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THE celebrations have changed over the past three generations: From my grandmother’s time to my daughter’s. When I was a very little girl, preparations for Divali meant a frenzied round of cleaning and the cooking of goodies. Women in a neighbourhood would do this collectively. Groceries were bought by the sack and distributed to all houses. These were to be cleaned, washed, dried and pounded. The flour for different delicacies like chakali, besan and rava laddoo, karanji, etc., was to be made. There would be the actual cooking of the food. Days were decided for this and all the women would gather in one house on a particular day, do all the work, and move on to the next home the next day. It would be a celebration of sorts in its own way, all the ladies in nine-yard saris, gossiping away as they worked, the older ladies and older children babysitting the little ones. Homes would be lit with rows of lamps. There would be collective bursting of crackers. Any child would go to any home and eat. There was no sense of boundaries. Huge rangolis and killas (miniature models of Shivaji’s forts from the Sahyadri range — complete with farms planted with germinating wheat/ legumes and model soldiers: This is very typical of Maharashtra) would be made in a spirit of competitiveness. By the time I was in my late teens, all this didn’t happen on the same scale. The culture of instant food, though, had not yet made its appearance. My mother, being a career woman, did not do all the labour-intensive work that my grandmother did. Much of the cooking and cleaning was still done at home, with the help of us kids, my grandmother and the house-help. My job during preparations for Divali would be the cleaning of the groceries, rolling the laddoos and extruding out the chakalis on square sheets of plastic paper which my mother would then deep fry. We had by then moved from our independent house to an apartment. There was no courtyard where we could make the killas. The rangoli was still made in a corner just outside the home. Global mobility means that most of us no longer stay near extended family. Goodies, or the ready ingredients for making them, also come packaged in supermarkets. I like to make my goodies myself, though not the whole range of them, just those that I know that my family loves. In a cosmopolitan society, not all of my neighbours celebrate in the same manner as we do but it makes for a give and take of customs. There are rangoli competitions and a community bursting of crackers, which also, many of us are now eschewing in the interest of the environment.
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