I say No to crackers on Diwali and colors on Holi…

Diwali is considered to be the biggest festival of Hindus but it is celebrated all over India without any cast or religion barrier. One way to celebrate this auspicious festival is, burning fire crackers. Why people opt for this way of “enlightenment”? May be, to get thrilled by watching the fireworks and enjoying the patterns created by the light. While the darker side of it emphasizes that, the joy comes with enormous amount of noise, pollution of all parts of our environment, potential increase in global warming, risk of people getting burnt or injured, huge quantity of waste material including industrial waste to be recycled and so on… Doesn’t it feel like just burning money to get mesmerized by the fire and sound work? In my opinion, it certainly does.

I believe, this money could be and can be saved for lots and lots of better purposes. Those who have lower or medium financial status can save this money for betterment of their families, and those who are financially more capable of spending money on such things could rather donate the money for the betterment of the society and the environment. There are like infinite needy people and places out there in our country which could be benefitted by such contributions. Think about a family which burns some money on moderate amount of crackers, move on to a good number of such families in a medium sized colony, moving further to a bunch of such colonies in one city, then more cities, states and so on. If you even try to estimate the kind of money spent in one day by the whole country, you would probably realize yourself that how better such money could have been used…

There is one counter argument usually given that cracker’s manufacturing gives employment and business to a lot of people in our country where sources of living and the opportunities are pretty lesser than the number of people seeking for them. Well my argument is, the sources such as crackers can benefit in terms of business, mainly once a year or may be few more occasions like marriages etc. Why do the people into this business have to wait for such events or festivals and remain unemployed for the rest of the time? I doubt that this would be most likely the case. Such people would definitely be involved or dependent in other sources of living in non-seasonal times, then why those ways can’t be continued at even the special seasons?

Now let’s talk about the Holi. Whole India becomes colorful when the festival of Holi comes up. It is considered to be the festival of colors. The traditional ways to celebrate this festival used to be Gulals and colors. But human brain is something which always tries to find out new ways of doing everything. With time, there have been nasty ways being and have been developed by human brains to color ourselves. The side effects are many; ranging from skin problems which most of us just ignore with the thinking that if there is a problem it would be for some time or may be few days, to the wastage of water and electricity which are the next biggies. Again if you think about the consumption of these resources by whole country on this very single day on non-regular cleaning work to clean up the mess created during this day, the whole idea could be easily figured out.

There can be many more arguments to support or oppose these issues but one should always think before that what all can we do to improve the situation of our country, our environment and our families? Probably utilizing the resources and money we have in most appropriates places and minimizing the wastage in all dimensions could be the way to start with…