It is already the end of October and Happy Halloween to you all. Given the wide power outage in CT due to the storm this past weekend, I am not sure how much trick or treating is likely to happen. I remember the days of planning for Halloween with our children, initially my wife yielding to their customized costume choices and then over the years, preference for what is available in the stores that is the latest and greatest to ordering them on the web. We all have gone through the years when there were scares about candies laced with poison and other things to worrying about the amount of sugar in take that a day like today brings. I think this is all fun.

Sept-Oct also happens to be a festival heavy month for us in India. Since Hindu calendar is lunar, our festivals do not fall on fix dates or sometimes not even in the same month. Two major festivals – Navaratri and Deepavali (also known as Diwali in the North) – are celebrated during these months. Deepavali is like the Christmas equivalent for us in terms of the way it is celebrated.

We get invited to go to our friends’ house for celebration. Since this invitation calendar is already overflowing, we return the favor for some other celebrations. Many of us have observed that in India these celebrations are not what used to be. During Deppavali, we used to burst a lot of fire crackers for an entire day. The day began at 4 AM. However, now, there are decibel limits on the sound generated by these fire crackers and that there have been time limits imposed on when the celebrations can occur. What fun is that?

Now, with Skype, many families share these celebrations across the globe. In many of the foreign countries, the sweets and savories of these celebrations are available readily in stores in major cities and they are shipped to order. Of course, the traditionalists still continue to toil in the kitchen making all the elaborate preparations. I remember my grandmother spending days preparing them, most of which are for distribution to friends and neighbors, who in turn brought theirs to ours.

Talking about firecrackers, in the seventies, the success rate for burst was a little above the best Baseball batting average – it was about .500. That meant, for certain type of fire crackers, every other piece didn’t go off. Few of us went and collected them and put them away for a bonfire at night and there were two groups. A lot of negotiations went on year after year – should we try to burst them as soon as we pick them up or should we wait to see them all go in a gigantic flame? Should we not want to be better than the other group?

It turns out that people in different parts of India celebrate these for very different reasons, a fact that I only learned in depth after coming to New York and reading a book about this!

As a true global citizen, we have participated in Navaratri and Deepavali celebrations already (and put on some weight) and hoping that we will have visitors tonight for trick or treating. And then we look forward to Thanksgiving and the Holiday celebrations in December and then Pongal, the harvest festival of India and so on…