Skip to main content

Diwali : Blending Sense with Tradition

Image
By
Diwali, the festival of joy, lights and cuisines, provides a perfect opportunity to blend tradition with dash of sense and demonstrate to neighbours and friends smart new ways of doing old things.
The Eats: A huge amount of effort and resources are traditionally spent in procuring or preparing sweets for neighbours, relatives, colleagues, partners and bosses. My rough guess is that, diabetes, obesity and heart problems being as common as they presently are, most of these traditional delicacies are hardly touched by those for whom they were intended, and find their way to homes of servants, drivers and junior office staff. 
Should you want your sweets to be savoured and remembered, you need to make them appealing, healthy and different so that guests who have nibbled at the same-old-sweets, are game to try more than a mouthful at your home.  Adding and garnishing your preparation with natural sweeteners such as honey, dates, figs and raisins could add originality and make them stand out.  Milder tastes are in vogue these days; hence cutting down on sugar would be wise. And as most adults are wary of greasy sweets, slashing the ghee and oil content, and baking rather than deep-frying could be recipes for success.
Try cut portions of fruits, either raw or stewed, dipped in honey, and topped with spices such as cinnamon, cardammon and fennel seeds as  mouth fresheners or a simple fruit salad with honey and spices, rather than gulab jamoon, barfi or the artificially coloured khoya sweets.
Lights:  The “made in China” coloured tuny bulbs seem to have become the commonest way we adorn our homes on Diwali. Use diyas for a change. Insects and mosquitoes are repelled or killed by fire and smoke, and not by Chinese-made tuny bulbs. Hence if the present outbreaks of Dengue and malaria are to subside after Diwali, you could play your small role too and appear truely traditionl as well.
Crackers and Fireworks:  If you can’t imagine Diwali without them, wear a touch of class and attitude on your sleeves by using eco-friendly ones. These use recycled paper, have less toxic fumes, shed brighter colored lights and conform to lower decibels of sound.
The spirit of Diwali is to celebrate the victorious home-coming of Purushottam Ram, reverred for his uprightness, devotion to duty and kindness to others; hence using fire-works that might set homes ablaze or creating loud noises that scare infants and cause heart attacks in the elderly are not quite in keeping with the spirit. Cracker fumes are known to precipitate acute attacks in asthmatics. Gambling was also not in vogue in the “Thretha yug” and drinking also not part of the tradition of Ramji’s times. 
Celebrating victory of right over wrong, sharing joy and gifts with less privileged, and caring for others may be more in keeping with the spirit of Ramji.  Make this Deepawali be different.
As published in HT City (  Hindustan Times ) dated 31 october, 2010.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teaching and Learning – is there a trick?

By
One of the big mistakes that we as parents and teachers often make, and that could stifle the mental development of our children, is to treat them as just small adults! In fact, it is this attitude of grown-ups that could be leading our next generation to become stereotyped conformists rather than original thinkers and innovators. And if we intend to drive home health messages and inculcate healthy habits we need to tailor our efforts to their cognitive potential. That children indeed think and discover the world differently was first noticed by a Swiss scientist Jean Piaget in the early 20th century. He studied his own three children grow and was intrigued by how they behaved, played games and learnt at different ages. With further observations and experiments, he propounded the theory of ‘cognitive development’, placed great importance on the education of children and is hailed even today, 30 years after his death, as a pioneer of the constructive theory of knowing.  He...
1 comment
Read more

The Doctor’s Dress

By
The familiar white coat worn by physicians as their distinctive dress for over 100 years, has started generating  murmurs  of controversy. It is not uncommon to find the blood pressure to be higher when measured by a white-coat-wearing-doctor in the hospital or clinic than the readings obtained at home by relatives.  This is due to the anxiety that the white coat and the hospital setting evokes in patients, and has been termed “White Coat Hypertension”. Mature clinicians often routinely subtract a few points from these measurements when entering records in case charts or calculating the dose of anti-hypertensive medications to be prescribed. The white coat scares children too.  Kids often express their dislike for this dress by crying and screaming and by denying access to their bellies or chest for examination by paediatricians in this attire. Many pediatricians across the world have folded up their white coats and taken to informal colourful dressing to...
2 comments
Read more

Food Fads in Liver Disorders

By
In an attempt at trying to do well to those they love, spouses and parents often enforce diets on patients of liver diseases that often turn out to be detrimental. The commonest food fad is pale insipid boiled cabbage being doled out to nauseous patients suffering from hepatitis that makes them puke even more.  The liver, in a way, is a buzzing manufacturing unit that requires lots of energy to keep its multiple functions going. And it derives all this from the food we eat. During disease, such as during an attack of jaundice, when many of the liver cells get killed, the liver attemptsdamage control by trying to regenerate quickly. For its cells to multiply however, it requires a generous supply of energy that comes from carbohydrates, and protein, the building block for its cells and tissues. Boiled green vegetables unfortunately have neither of these. Hence the situation often progresses to that of a starved liver unable to recuperate due to cut-off food suppl...
2 comments
Read more