Ok so its the festival of light, so where is the connection between loud banger type crackers that sound like a bomb going off and light? ??

Yesterday and last night we had Diwali, I could have sworn that outside there was a war going on. It was that loud with explosions. it was so loud the windows would rattle! It all started at about 1pm, so I closed up the apartment turned on the aircon and turned on loud music to as the muffle out some of the noise and stop the poor dogs from going mad from the noises….didn’t really work.

Now our apartment complex had a rule that there would be no fireworks after 10pm, which was fine by me, and there were none. So we went for our last walk of the night at 9.30pm in relative quietness, just distant explosions and crackers going off. I mistakenly thought it was over for the night.

The local puja commandos (the men who organize the festivals at the complex and demand you pay them money) had spent the day decorating with lights, there was much discussion going on and ordering around of the apartment electricians for hours yesterday, this is what it looked like last night.

This is looking towards the apartment building next door, you can see the smoke from the crackers in the air and how thick it was….cant be healthy!

So being fairly exhausted from not much sleep the night before thanks to the odd loud explosion and the fact I have a head cold, we retired for the night…. well we thought we had retired for the night. But it was not to be.

At 12.39am to be exact the occupants of the lower income building next door (yes they are classed by income, I am in a HIG complex, High Income Group, which means you earn more than Rs100 000 per mth ($2000)) decided to start their diwali celebrations. It wasnt enough that they had employed the services of a drummer and bell boy who since 3am had been walking around the complex banging a out of beat drum, no we had to have a fireworks festival now. Problem is there isnt such a big gap between our buildings!

You can see how close we are to them, and you can actually see a cracker that has fallen over on its side and is about to shower the crowd in sparks in this pic.

They had skyrockets and bombs that went from 12.39am to around 4am. At one point a skyrocket exploded into our building and hit the bedroom window! I looked out to watch them light another skyrocket, that promptly went into their own buildings, and one part of it went into the crowd of people. It was pretty simple why they were having problems, the skyrockets were being sat in what looked like a big jar on the ground.

Really how stupid can people be, I wonder how many people were maimed , killed or burnt from fireworks last night. Just during the afternoon I could see 2 houses on fire in the distance, obviously from some firecracker that had gone in the wrong direction…or maybe they were lighting them inside, nothing would surprise me!

This morning the air is heavy with the smell of gunpowder from the crackers, here is what it looks like.