Diwali is celebrated in the darkness of Kartik Amavasya through the festival of light to illuminate our dark feelings, egos, obsessions, and insecurities. 
However, the same festival turns out to be an extravaganza of smoke, pollution, and sound every year. This year the sounds are amplified with the sounds of missiles, and human cry to a higher frequency catalysed by a few wars. The power of these sounds always dominate the voice of help from animals, people with asthma, and sound pollution. Is it this power of sound domination due to which firecrackers, agri residues, and houses are burnt in New Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Russia, and many more: even though the acts are defined to be criminal by law and norms of Kartik Amavasya.
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The field of heuristics in Psychology will say that people cannot personalize the distant pains to others from their acts and hence in society firecrackers, houses, and air get burnt and polluted. Simple answers that can be relatable to me, or you will be looked after as an answer to these complex questions of society. Hence, I will always justify an action through such simple answers and continue to burn. It continues as my action is insignificant when in a society every human being is a criminal of some order, degree as knowingly or unknowingly, we burn something or the other. So, my, our act of burning continues. Often it continues because the pleasure, and benefits of living on the edge, with a false sense of pleasure power are higher than the costs of consequential impacts of that living on everyone in a society. Hence people continue smoking, drinking, cheating, corrupt practices, dropping bombs, investing in high-risk assets, engaging in extramarital, serial killers kill, abusers abuse, and lovers continue loving.
Today, in 2023, on Diwali, suddenly all these reminded me of Burima Chocolate Bomb, Dodoma, and Kalipotka of childhood in Kolkata. The names were all metaphors for my inexplicable escape from reality with a sense of pleasure, power, and violence.
Hence, they are metaphors for my memories of the childhood pleasure of getting an escape route from the reality of violence, vulnerability, and power. All this was going fine till 2006 when the scary, anxious eyes of a stray dog on Diwali night made me nude in front of my power, pleasure, and vulnerability.
The darkness of Kartik Amabasya of 2006 therefore made me a jocker in front of the mirror. Since then, firecrackers left me even though it has not left society. Hence metaphors of burima chocolate bomb memories, sounds, and lyrics of war and pollution are still being written in a society - "Where it is normal to be a little bit of Criminal Everyday"!
Disclaimer: All Views Expressed are Personal.
