Festival of Lights

As the beautiful daylight fades, darkness begins to show its colours.

Diwali falls on a new moon day, when stars are supposed to shine their brightest, a day where night sky looks the prettiest in the year.

After a long day of festivities, when children get exhausted from running around & bursting crackers, and adults from visiting relatives & supervising kids in their cracker-bursting ventures, one look at the fogged sky and thinks ‘there’s something that’s not right’.

There's more to that than what just meets the eye. The fume particles emitted during Diwali from bursting of crackers are less than 1 micron to down to 0.01 micron in size and thus can reach the innermost portion of the lungs. Statistics prove that more number of people fall sick around Diwali than at any other of the year. There's a 5-25% increase in number of asthma complaints in a normal population. Children hurt and burn themselves while playing with crackers and other fireworks. The constant ear-bursting sounds and polluted air make this s period a nightmare for the elderly and the ill, as well as for animals. Every year, we breathe in pollution & carp about the racket, and wish we could live in peaceful surroundings, far away from the city clatter. Unfortunately, we are the same people who cause all this.

Let’s rise above the noise and air pollution we generate every Diwali. Let’s create a better world for our children. A few years on, when they look up at the sky on Diwali, let’s hope they still can spot the stars twinkling at them.