Villages doll themselves up to welcome Diwali

During one of my weekly scooter rides into the villages I happened to see the ladies of villages paint their home wall exteriors and interiors with cow dung and chalk powder. After talking to them, I got to know that this was their way of ushering in the festival of lights. Most of the other newspapers in Bhopal had stories of people preparing for the festival of lights while we at the Hindustan Times, Bhopal showed the village side instead.

Barely a few kilometers from the loud and shimmering Diwali celebrations in the State Capital, the rural hamlets are abuzz with preparations for a more simple and traditional festival of lights. Despite the in-efficient rains – which have spelt a difference of fest-harvest bounty and disaster for adjoining villages separated by just a few kilometers – the villagers are upbeat about welcoming the festival.
Houses with the thatched and tiled roofs are being given a new look with women shading from the front by applying fresh cow dung paste on the outer walls of their homes. Come to think of it, they’ve never even heard of the oil-based distemper that’s so popular in the nearby State Capital.
Villages on the Old Sehore road have a different pattern for decorating their homes than their counterparts from the Hoshangabad road side. The villages of Gora, Bisankedi, Ratibad, Neelbad and Sehore first plaster the walls with cow dung and then paint drawings with white and red limestone water.
In other parts, they just make do with the cow dung paste. “This is because we on the Misrod road have forgotten our traditional values,” says 70 years old Umrao Singh Patidar. He adds that since the city of Bhopal is growing in all directions, they had to stop performing the tradition “Gau Pooja” on Diwali. “The BDA has acquired the land on which the entire village used to get together every year to perform the Pooja,” he rued.
The villages on the Old Sehore Road have managed to keep alive their reverential rites for the bovines.

Fourty years old Sharda from Ratibad village feels that city slickers should watch the full pooja rites collectively performed by the villagers to go back to their roots. She adds that the tradition cuts across caste and creed.
25-year old farmer Ganshyam Patidar from Jaatkhedi village off Misrod says that this Diwali is a happy one for him and his family because the rains were enough to reap a good harvest.
However 60 years old Hari Singh, a farmer from the Neelbad village on another side of the State capital, says it is a poor festival for him because of the excessive rainfall towards the end of monsoon that damaged his standing crops.
The cow owners strike a rich harvest during Diwali with the demand for milk going up by 75%.
Harvest or no harvest, the quaint Diwali traditions of the rural folks will go on for the time being, till such time that being, till such time that the State Capital’s miasmic urban sprawl engulfs their little hamlets and fields.

Cracker makers to cash in on current & trendy

This was a trendy and timely story I got, exactly after one month of the twin tower attack in 2001, in which terrorist used planes loaded with innocent people ramming them onto the twin towers, to raze it to dust. The cracker industry in Tamil Nadu raked in all kind of images on the covers to ensure that their product hits with a big bang. And sell they did but on the images of a sordid happening to mankind by some forces which keeps denying the authority of freedom to live for all humanity.

Like every year, for this Diwali too cracker manufactures have put up various motifs- current and catchy – on their product covers to woo customers.
So expect the images of 9/11 terrorist strikes and the crumbling twin towers as well as cracker bombs going by names like ‘4 Bangs’ to symbolize the four attacks in the US.
And that’s not all. Names from even Hollywood films seem to have caught the imagination of the cracker makers this year. Titles of such Hollywood block busters as ‘Anaconda’ (after the giant South American snake) and ‘Jungle Book’ for tiny-tots are also to be found on the color schemes of some cracker covers.
However, the pride of place must surely go to such Bollywood hits such as ‘Suryavanshi’, ‘Tridev’ and ‘Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai’ that have had their names modified in some cases. Then, there’s a scary angle as well with Khooni-Raat covers.
The cola wars also get a mention in a bid to up the cracker sales. The catchy one-liner “Yeh Dil Maange More” appears on some cracker wrappers, apparently to catch them young. Paan could well be a down market, but the ‘Paan Bomb’ may not be targeting just that customer segment.
Faces of doe-eyed and raven-haired Bollywood beauties like Kajol have been liberally used on cracker covers earlier as well. They retain their place this time too.
Since the Sivakasi connection dominates the cracker industry, Tamil starlet Roja appears on some sparkler packets. Other faces are of youth icons like Sharukh Khan, Salman Khan and Amir Khan.
The cracker makers of the sulphur city of Sivakasi have tried their best to make a strong sales pitch using everything that is current and happening. Some sharp acumen appears to have gone into selecting the titles, stars and starlets for the North Indian region.
Down South, the same set of covers have dusky South Indian heroines and macho action heroes enticing the buyers.

Quick Gun Ramanna

From the Asiad to school championship's his steady trigger finger has launched a thousand races. As one of the nation's oldest and most respected starters at athletic events, Ramanna has devised his own unique pistol for the purpose.

This story so happened when I went to cove the Inter School athletic meet at the Kanteerva stadium when I saw an old friend Ramanna sir, (as he was known to us in 1980 - 85 when I used to take part in the Inter school Athletic meets), to my surprise Ramanna sir was there after a gap of more than 23 years, still firing away his pistol at the starting point. This time he had a modernized pistol which he had designed himself which he does always. So I quickly walked up to him wished him and he at once recognized me to my luck. I quickly asked him if I could write about him and his passion for making pistol used for starting any race, to which he obliged and below is the story which was published in the Bangalore Mirror edition on July 3rd, 2008.

GET SET, READY, GO RAMANNA
His is a life as an aperitif. Unobtrusive, not quite the main course but the mandatory shot required to set things into motion. That about sums up A Ramanna’s life, as a starter at athletic events across the country. A vocation requiring a split second of work, but a critical second at that.
For, can any of the athletes sprint across without Ramanna’s boom. A starter is the person who sounds the gun-shot at athletic events, the boom sounding the go-ahead for runners poised in their on-your-mark positions. And Ramanna has been doing this for a livelihood for decades now, since 1978.

70 year old Ramanna the Race Starter fires to start yet another race in the Inter school meet in Bangalore on Wednesday 2nd July 2008. Ramanna fires from his own patented pistol which has two triggers, one for starting the race and the other to recall the runner in case of a foul start. He also trains youngesters who are intrested in becoming starters.

The septuagenarian has grown so fond of his job of 30 years, that he has now designed his own pistol or starting gun. “I have collected sulphur from crackers, made pellets of them and designed a contraption that holds this in place, like a pistol. But this can be used only for sports, it only makes the right sound and emits some smoke but is not dangerous at all” explains Ramanna.

LABOUR OF LOVE
Surprisingly, the man, who has been with the Karnataka State Athletic Association, has thus far not received a single gun for this rather important shot. This prompted him to design his own pistols and distribute them free to sundry starters across the country. “I have not received any encouragement from the Association but I’m doing this for myself because I love this job. When there is an athletic meet, I just get some remuneration “says Ramanna, who according to the rolls of the Association is called a Technical Official.
Name any major athletic meet in any part of the country and he’s been there, right from the Asiad at New Delhi in 1982 to the recent Inter National athletic meet in Bangalore. He has stepped out of India once to Sri Lanka for a sporting event. The 70-year old has designed some 15 pistols or starter guns so far, all with his own money.

A PERFECTIONIST
When he’s not attending athletic meets, he meticulously collects information on the right kind of starter pistol that can go off without any hitch. As some other officials at the Kantreeva stadium recall, there have been days when a gong or some other gun had to be used for the purpose when athletes would literally be waiting with bated breath. “The latest one I have designed has two triggers, one for the actual shot and another for recalling, if an anxious runner starts before the signal is sounded,” says Ramanna.
Smoking barrels, doesn’t the Athletic Association really think he doesn’t deserve a thing for wielding a megaphone and sounding a start?
Says Satyanarayana, secretary of the KSAA, “Ramanna retired from HAL and whenever he is the starter at a meet, he gets Rs 1000 a day. There are lots of people like him who work as starters simply for the work enjoyment ad the sense of involvement.