Last Tuesday, students participated in celebrating the Indian holiday, Diwali, during advisory time. Diwali, India’s biggest holiday, is a five-day celebration honoring the victory of light over darkness. This festival includes many rituals, including cleaning homes, decorating homes with lights and rangoli and wearing new clothes to symbolize the start of a new year. Many people also light clay lamps outside their homes to protect them from spiritual darkness. Families often join together and eat specific Indian foods such as Kheer, which is a type of rice pudding.
“We usually go to our temple and we pray to the gods. We also celebrate by doing fireworks. We have different days that we do different rituals and traditions, and we also light candles and make decorations outside our house,” sophomore Siya Patel said.
Another meaningful tradition is washing coins to become blessed with money for the new year. Freshman Ronik Patel enjoys participating in several Diwali traditions.
“My favorite tradition is where we wash coins in order to honor the god Lakshmi, and when you wash the coins, it is essentially blessing you with wealth and money for a year,” R. Patel said.
Another popular ritual involves uncooked rice colored with food dye to welcome the goddess Lakshmi into their homes and bless them with wealth and success. However, the rice is not used as you may think it is.
“We color rice and then we kind of make designs with it outside our front house area, and then we also put candles outside,” S. Patel said.
Several students spoke regarding Diwali during assembly last Monday to bring attention to the celebration. Following the assembly, students were given Diwali coloring sheets to complete and put on their advisor’s door. R. Patel shares his opinion on how Diwali is celebrated at school.
“Obviously, it’s not an American holiday, so we’re not gonna celebrate as much, but I think just with the speech that we give, and the advisory coloring, I think that’s pretty good,” R. Patel said.
While students got to participate in the coloring sheets honoring Diwali, some think that there should have been more activities throughout the week to allow students to connect deeper with Diwali.
“I think we should do more activities like painting candles. I think that will help people get connected with Diwali because it’s a craft and people like to do crafts,” S. Patel said.