Twenty-one years ago, when I came to America from India, I was amazed by its opportunities. Wasting no time, I started a software company that will celebrate its 22nd birthday next May. Doing business in the country was more straightforward, and accessibility to various institutions was much more comfortable than in India. However, when it came to how our president is elected, I still can’t say I have all the answers.
After a few years here, I realized that not everything between the two countries is different. Both are democracies, of course. More remarkable to me has been how America resembles India in look and spirit during their respective year-end holiday seasons. Homes, offices and markets in both countries are lit up during this period because of the different festivals and traditions each country celebrates.
For Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hannukah, Christmas and New Year’s Eve here during these weeks, India has Dussehra, Diwali, Bandi Chhor Diwas, Guru Nanak’s birth anniversary, Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Diwali is the greatest of them and celebrated nationally in October or November as per the dictates of the lunar calendar. It is celebrated on the same scale as Christmas in America and other Western countries.
Diwali is also called the “festival of lights,” and fireworks are an integral part of the celebration. Thanks to last year’s efforts and the initiative of Jay Muthukamatchi, it became possible for the first time in Delaware to buy and sell fireworks 30 days before every Diwali.
Halloween reminds me of Lohri (a bonfire celebration), which falls in the middle of January. Looking at boys and girls in the neighborhood going from door to door asking, “Trick or treat?” I recall my Lohri days as a young boy going with a group of other boys to various houses on my home street and adjoining lanes asking for “Lohri!”
The grand Annakut celebration at the BAPS Swaminarayan Mandir (Temple) in New Castle. During the celebration, there is an offering of different kinds of goods to God, accompanied by prayer. Annakut is part of the five day Diwali, or “Festival of Lights,” which coincides with the Hindu New Year and is celebrated around the world by millions of Hindus, Sikhs and Jains.
Neighborhood folks gave us cooked groundnuts and traditional Lohri sweets made from jaggery. It was incumbent upon those neighborhood houses to be extra generous in giving where a son’s wedding had recently happened, or they had been blessed with a male child. The gender bias has since largely passed, but unfortunately some of it still lingers on.
I am a Sikh. In Thanksgiving, I see the personification of Sarbat Da Bhala (prosperity, well-being, and glory of the whole universe) spirit. Every Sikh prayer, no matter what occasion, day, time, and place, ends with these three words: Sarbat Da Bhala.
I, too, said these words with everyone else because I had seen my parents, siblings, relatives and other Sikhs do the same. But I understood its essence only after arriving here in America and experiencing Thanksgiving and learning its background. To me, native Indians had enacted and personified the Sarbat Da Bhala’s underlying meaning in the Sikh prayer.
This year, while I am happy to see lights on neighbors’ houses and front yards, I can also see apprehension in many of their faces about what this election and the days and weeks following it will bring. Maybe the lights are illuminating the darkness convulsing our hearts and minds ravaged by the soaring coronavirus numbers, historic unemployment, increasing pain and suffering of the poor and vulnerable, and divisions like never before among this country’s various communities.
Regardless of whether America retains Trump or sends our Delaware’s Joe Biden to the White House, I want and wish that there be a light for everyone in the embrace of hope and peace.
Delaware Air National Guard Adjutant General Carol Timmons (center left) speaks with Charanjeet Singh Minhas of the Delaware Sikh Awareness Coalition at a Thanksgiving prayer breakfast.
Fortunately, I know of many ordinary Delawareans doing extraordinary work toward that goal: veterans in the Interfaith Veterans Workshop group founded by Rev. Tom Davis; members in my writing group, Brandywine Writers Circle, founded and led by Joan Leof; and a host of others — pastors, imams, rabbis, Hindu and Sikh priests in Delaware — who are part of efforts to spread love and peace and defeat hatred and violence.
They are all — in their languages, in their traditions, in their own homes or their places of worship, in their own words and ways — praying for Sarbat Da Bhala.
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