Civilization spelt backward

Today’s Times of India (Mumbai Edition) carried the news on the front page of two children on the verge of losing their eyesight as the crackers they played with burst at an unanticipated moment. Two days back the same spot of the paper was filled with the news item that on this diwali the level of noise in Mumbai has far exceeded the allowed level. Four days back the same spot carried the news of 5 peoples’ death as a cracker shop caught fire in Delhi.

This is just the replay of what might had happened in last year in a different node. The individual tragic cases get suppressed under the commercial extravagance.

On this Diwali night I was in Pune. On my way to a friends place, I witnessed roaring smoke filled roads filled with cracker debris. Almost all the friends and relatives I talked to during diwali days have said that they could not sleep late into the night, or forced to wake up very early in the morning (4 o'clock or so) at the sound of crackers. News items on disobeying the time-restrictions on crackers were reported from different cities. Be it Bhubaneswar, Delhi, Pune or Mumbai, I have observed form my childhood that on a diwali evening (now a days it is not just one evening but several evenings, late evenings, nights, and early mornings) one doesn’t get to breathe even once without hearing an explosion. A continuous bombardment of thundering noises split ones ears at every moment. There are some soft sounding crackers, but they sound soft, not because they are made to produce low decibel of noise; actually, they are equally deafening. Just that they are fired at a place distant from our stay. Hence, they lose the strength by the time they reach our ear. But yes, on the way they must have caused the damage to the people who reside in the vicinity, quite similar to what a neighborhood bomb cracker causes to us.

Now a days, Diwali is less a "festival of lights", and more a "festival of sounds" or rather "festival of noise", irritating, and harmful noise. One feels restless, precisely because, unlike a television remote s/he does not have the control to decrease the volume nor change to a different ambience (channel). I just wonder –
Is it real fun to being continuously subjected to high decibel noise for several hours, several days?
Are there people who like these, enjoys these Or they are just following a routine?

Don’t we feel necessary to review the use of crackers on diwali? I see crackers are ‘mini explosives’. It carries the danger throughout its complete life cycle. I am sure the people working at its manufacturing site must be experiencing dangers of similar nature with difference in scale and scope.

Without any accidents, crakers affect environment in a big way. Accidents, cause fatal consequences. Is it worth to carry this tradition of bursting crackers, just because we have been doing it for last several decades!

Any thoughts?