Bright lights and the smell of chai greeted students as they packed into Roone Arledge Auditorium on Saturday to celebrate Diwali, the Indian festival of lights.
Despite the limitations of the auditorium, organizers tried to recreate the type of celebration that students would be missing at home—by distributing boxes of sweets to each table to simulate the traditional offering of sweets to neighbors and by using electric candles to mimic the traditional lighting of oil lamps.
“This is an event I come for every year,” Pranith Ramamurthy, SEAS, who is originally from Bangalore, said. “You miss your family, so this is an alternate. No one can fill that void, but meeting people and seeing them celebrate helps even out the part of you that’s missing your family.”
The Hindu Students Organization and Ahimsa, Columbia’s Jain students organization, co-hosted the event, which was also co-sponsored by the Sikh Student Association and open to all—including many who had never attended a Diwali celebration before.
“We really feel that our job ... is to educate the broader Columbia community from all parts of the spectrum as to what Diwali means in terms of its religious significance and also to give them a flavor of how it is celebrated in a cultural sense,” Rohit Iragavarapu, CC ’12 and a co-coordinator of HSO, said.
That double education was evident in the use of a projector to display the origins and traditions of Diwali, and in the set-up of the small shrine to Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. People could also have their hands decorated with henna, make decorative designs called rangoli, play “finger billiards” or carrom, and try on Indian clothes and jewelry in a photo booth.
In order to highlight Diwali’s role as a celebration of new beginnings, attendees were invited to write down promises to themselves on leaf-shaped pieces of paper and affix them to a paper “Tree of Resolutions.” Diwali also encourages giving, so attendees were encouraged to make donations to Shots for Shots, a nonprofit dedicated to vaccinating children in India.
“This is one of the few times of the year when you actually really get that cross-cultural communication, so people who aren’t as familiar with the culture get a chance to engage, learn a little bit more, eat the food, talk to the people,” Alex Jasiulek, CC ’13, who attended the event, said.
After a presentation and a meal of traditional Indian favorites, the music turned to a mix of Bollywood music and Western hits.
“One thing that we are always thinking about is this is a college audience at the end of the day, and we need to be relatable,” Iragavarapu said. “We’ve kind of picked and chosen the elements of the celebration that we think are going to be most effective at doing two things. Number one is getting the message across, and number two is entertaining people.”
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