A festive week in Baroda

Since last weekend India is in Diwali fever. It's the most important festival in India and linked to the story in the Ramayana epic where Lord Rama comes back to India after defeating Ravana in Lanka (Sri Lanka). Basically, it is the festival of lights: every house is decorated with colourful lamps and candles are lit around the house every evening during one week. Families also decorate their homes with flowers and rangoli (sand paintings). On saturday evening crackers, fireworks, "bombs", volcanos are lit and fill the streets with life... and noise. This actually happenes three days before and three days after as well. People get very excited about it. In addition the state of Gujarat was celebrating New Year on Monday, so you can imagine how fantastic the mood is over here at the moment. :)

Piece of art made of sand at a rangoli exhibition

In our office we celebrated this event last Friday: from Thursday evening on, everybody was buzzing around, putting up flowers, ribbons, painting rangoli on the floor to turn the whole office into an absolutely faboulous place. No wall, no window, no desk was left out. We can't even imagine anything similar to this. Unfortunately security restrictions in our office prohibit pictures to be taken otherwise I would have been able to share this with you. All these efforts were done for the purpose of ecorating the place beautifully together, not to have it decorated. It's really the process which is important. Because on Friday evening everything was over. For this event everyone was wearing traditional dresses: men would come in kurta and women all wore a saari.... including me. Everybody was absolutely thrilled about it, much more than I was myself. And I even got a special award for it in the internal Diwali competition. :)

My friend Raj and me wearing the traditional Indian dress for office celebration.