It's the end of October and the winter cold is beginning to creep in. It's that time of year when back home in New Delhi, the weather is turning gorgeous and traffic goes crazy as people are out shopping, visiting and partying; this year, on Oct. 26, Hindus celebrated Deepavali, otherwise known as Diwali — the festival of lights. In the old days there used to be prettily decorated clay lamps or diyas, but now people just string up the most garish−looking, randomly twinkling, sometimes strangely singing lights, turning the exteriors of their homes into elaborate, ostentatious birthday cakes.
Diwali is celebrated so far and wide that even here at Tufts, we had an event on Friday night, and I'm sure many of you attended and were greeted with free Indian food and loud Bollywood music.
Just to give a quick explanation, Diwali is essentially Hindu New Year. If you want to know its origins, read the story of the Ramayana, one of our two main religious epics. In the story, Lord Rama, together with his wife, goddess Sita, and his brother, Laxman, return to their Kingdom of Ayodhya after 14 long years of exile and are led back home by the villagers, who light lamps to celebrate their return and show them the way back home — hence the title of "festival of lights." In this modern day, the festival, celebrated over pretty much the entire month that befalls it, involves many things: painting and cleaning up homes, new clothes, prayer ceremonies, good food, card parties (where people get together to lose tons of money playing teen patti — a game similar to Texas Hold'Em), and fireworks that go off at random hours of the night.
This year is my first Diwali away from home. I am not sure who missed my not−being−there more: me or my family immersed in all the revelries. What has kept me from sinking into despondency is that people are beginning to count down to Thanksgiving break (in less than a month, by the way.) Not yet wholly part of the tradition, a group of my friends, all freshmen in different universities across the United States, have planned to use the break to meet up in New York and reconnect. Somehow we knew we would need to see each other by then — still about a month before there is a chance to go home.
Picking up from where I left off last week, the notion of similarity through difference, and looking at these two big festivals that fall around the same time of year, Thanksgiving exudes a similar aura as Diwali. Thanksgiving, like Diwali, is family− and friends−oriented, as demonstrated when people go home to their families to be together.
Counting down until a certain holiday and looking forward to a break is universal, but I am willing to argue that for college students, Thanksgiving is definitely most looked−forward−to as the first break since the beginning of the academic year and because of the rush of activity it brings. I hope that, like myself, all the young freshmen here from other parts of the world have found something to do while our peers are home gorging their faces. Any which way one chooses to look at it though, the fact of the matter is that the festive feeling can be felt by all during that period of time. The atmosphere is warm, it's comforting, and it's exactly what you need heading into the cold winter period.
Season's Greetings, readers.
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AngadBagai is a freshman who has not yet declared a major. He can be reached at Angad.Bagai@tufts.edu.
