Dussehra wishes. Those were the days....

May I take this occasion to wish all of you a very happy Dussehra!

I'm taken back in time when I see the frenetic preparations for setting up 'pandals' at various parts of the city for celebrating the 'Puja festival'. I used to be a part of a huge joint family, the patriarch of which was my maternal grandfather, PN Panicker. Since the house consisted of around 26 people - included about four to five resident guests over and above our static strength of 21 - every event was celebrated at a correspondingly large level. We kids - 13 of us - enjoyed such occasions thoroughly!

On the eve of the Dussehra, we used to be instructed to hand over our study materials and musical instruments to be offered for puja, in the puja room and on those three days no one would ask us to study(one's supposed to abstain from reading of any sort during those days when Goddess Saraswati was perusing one's books!) which was a great thing. We kids used to be on the look out for defaulters amongst us who read inadvertently during this phase - I must confess that I was a constant defaulter on this front because of having read a line or two from the newspaper or magazine lying around! The other children - my cousins - used to consider me a 'black sheep', on this score and because of their constant surveillance, I was prone to err much to their mirth. What made matters worse was that some of the uncles and aunts used to take a vicarious pleasure in pointing out the defaulters to the others! And the penalty was high - the defaulter had to sacrifice his or her pudding(It was here that my grandmother was very helpful in that she would give me secret helpings with a promise that I should not tell about it to the others. No prizes for guessing that I'd break it soon after consumption, making her position rather tenuous).

Another added attraction was that there would be so many visitors on call that we children would be left to ourselves without the supervision of any of the elders and usually, we took advantage of such situations!!

O, those halcyon and carefree days! Hope one had the power to rewind to such happy occasions....