The Internet of a Festival

The festival season is upon us here in India. It’s non-stop celebration from now on. 

It began a while ago with the Ganesh celebrations some time ago and sashayed smoothly into what are called the Navratris.

For the uninitiated, Navratris literally translated mean 9 nights and these nine nights are celebrated differently across the country. But that’s not what I want to talk about. Today I want to talk about the internet of a festival.

It’s strange how the internet has transformed the way we celebrate our festivals. For instance, I always knew that in Gujarat and for most Gujaratis the Navratris are celebrated with 9 nights of dancing. When this is done well (and I don’t know how to do it well, but some women excel at it) it looks beautiful. In the dark of the night, women in their colourful finery dance in a circle with the clapping of hands or with sticks with their male partners. It’s amazing to watch as the circle moves to unison with the clapping sounds, swaying of the bodies and the swishing of the lovely skirts the women wear.

Now comes the internet.

And what I realize is that each day has an assigned colour. I’d love to know in which age this was decided. Was it in the Neolithic Age, the Paleolithic Age or maybe it’s the Fashion Age. Or the Internet age? (I have a few questions … like who decides on the colours but I will leave those for now.) 

Nine nights of the Fashion Goddess

Here for instance are the ‘prescribed’ colours this year.

Day 1     Red

Day 2     Royal Blue          

Day 3     Yellow

Day 4     Green                  

Day 5     Grey

Day 6     Orange

Day 7     White   

Day 8   Pink                        

Day 9     Sky Blue.

Now this is what you are supposed to do. On each of the days wear something of the specified colour. Simple? Right? I think so too.

Not only simple, I thought it was fun. Now I am not the religious kind but a little bit of a smile from the Goddess (and there are three here – Power, Wealth and Knowledge) would always help jog me along further in my life. And if it meant digging into some dark depths of my cupboard to look for (even) sky blue stuff, why ever not.

As someone who always has ‘nothing to wear’ I took this as a bit of a challenge. One - to convince myself that I do own the possible nine ‘divine’ colours that the Goddess would approve of. And two - to add some colour into my daily mundane work life.

So I have embarked on this ‘colourful’ journey.

Red for the first day was easy.

Royal blue was also right up there. And I was quite victorious at that.

If my closet is a bit awry, it’s because the yellow things was right at the bottom and some things did get upended on the second day.

But today was the fourth day and today green was a bit of, let’s put it this way, a challenge. So I used my resourcefulness and wore something cream with black and added a green jacket. I did wear green earrings. And just to appease the green goddess I also wore a tinge of green eye shadow. Ha! Triumph!

The way I look at it is this. If the Goddess of Green is looking around she is going to be assaulted by yards and yards of green with the women in sarees, long flowy kurtas and similar. When she sees that speck of green in my earrings, the dot that goes for the eye shadow and the thready lace jacket… isn’t she going to be impressed with my creativity? Don’t Goddesses also need a challenge? Don’t they also want some brain teasers looking for the green in the ones who chose to follow the colour circuit.

Well, here I am. I am feeling blessed. And the grass is definitely greener on this side.

(Four more days to go… I will update you in a later post as to how the nine days went! Am sure the Goddesses are waiting!)