Diwali, or Deepavali as it is called in the south, is a joyous occasion but this time it has brought only tears. What a bizarre Deepavali it is this year, with the awful blazing fires in the sky and the earth, with ear-splitting sound from non-stop bombing. I may not be in Gaza, but my mind refuses to leave the place and my very soul shudders each moment.

I have never been excited by Diwali because it seemed too embedded in a binary narrative of good vs. evil, which may not true to the spirit of the Ramayana anyway. But Deepavali, as it was celebrated here in Kerala rarely drew on it . It was a children’s festival in every way. Children were given oil baths to prepare their bodies for the season of the mists ahead, and fed oily sweets. I stopped celebrating it when the children around me grew up and left home.

On this Deepavali, please think of the relentless murder of the children of Gaza, of the perverted avatar of light and sound raining death on the innocents there. Please think of the healers, doctors and nurses and all others who refuse to leave their patients even in the face of death’s grimace. Just as in the Ramayana, there is no perfect good or perfect evil in this conflict.

And no, please don’t block your compassion repeating the zionist state’s claim about murdered Israeli children. Horrendous as it was, it cannot justify the ongoing carnage. The world claims to have overcome the brutal justice of an eye for an eye, but even that demands only equal damage. It is different here. This is naked racism — which shamelessly proclaims that 1200 Israeli lives lost, and a couple of hundreds of hostages are worth more than hundreds of thousands of Palestinian lives destroyed, innocents butchered. And Israel and its keepers will not even let us mourn.

Sunita Viswanath, of Hindus for Human Rights, USA, writes eloquently about this year’s Diwali:

I Feel a Dissonance Between Deepavali Celebrations and Gazan Children’s Pleas for a Chance to Survive