Ooh that beautiful smoke in the air. Smoke that’s so potent that all the bling on people’s clothes look just like…. Nothing. They would mean something if you could actually see a meter in front of you but since you can’t, you wait for the next day when people post their FABULOUS Diwali pictures on Facebook and Instagram.

It was impressive when the Supreme Court brought down strict rules for Diwali. I was almost sure that another Sabarimala ruckus was looking us straight in the eye. You can steal candy from a child but you don’t take a phooljhari from a Dilliwala’s hand. “Tu janta nahi mera baap kaun hai!” Arre bhai, go look at your dear father whose coughing up his lungs because of the smoke. He has more pertinent things to do than answer your questions on your father’s identity.

We Dilliwalas love our Diwalis. It’s just not possible for us to scrimp on this day. After all, everything from our houses to our clothes needs to be decked up in LED lights. And, when we break so many rules on a routine basis, what’s a few more? Two hours for bursting crackers? Are you crazy? How will we wear our dressy clothes, perform the pooja, eat the sweets, go to each other’s houses before eight? Just not possible! See? You should have thought about that Supreme Court. So many judges and no sense of judgment!

There are also people who recognize that the air is polluted. So they do the right thing. They burst crackers with their masks on. So ingenious! Have your fun shooting rockets into the air and also protect yourself by spending a little extra on the filter masks.

To give us credit, we were surprisingly more rule abiding than people think; at least many of us. On the actual day of the celebrations, I saw only a handful of people bursting crackers and very few at that in my own locality. After all, not all of us can be like those tenacious men and women who scoured the streets to find the fireworks sellers. CBI would solve its cases much faster if they just employed these people in their service. It takes a sharp mind and x-ray vision to look through the storefronts and find those sneakily hidden crackers. Alas, not all of us can be such world-class detectives! Most of us will have to live with the label of being environment conscious despite the fact we tried not to be. To think I had was glad enough that my heart felt warm with pride on that cool night. It was probably just the smoke burning up my trachea.

In totality, this year too, we made beautiful rangolis, clicked more pictures of ourselves than required and kept the fireworks industry in business for another year.