Budgeting for green crackers: three family orders
What ₹3,000, ₹5,000 and ₹8,000 buy for a Bengaluru family, with the transport charge included.
Planning Deepavali night, hour by hour
A simple running order for lamps, sparklers and fountains that keeps the evening calm and the children happy.
The best Deepavali evenings we hear about are the planned ones. Not rigidly, but with a rough order, so the youngest children are not up past their bedtime and the big fountains are not lit in a hurry at the end.
Start at dusk, around 6.15 pm in Bengaluru in late October. Light the clay diyas first, along the balcony ledge, the doorstep and the rangoli. Set one diya on a steady stand, away from curtains, to light everything else from. Then the small children get their turn: 10 cm sparklers and twinklers, one at a time, with an adult beside each child and a bucket of water close by.
By 7.30 the older children move on to the 15 and 30 cm sparklers, and this is the time for photographs, when there is still a little colour in the sky. Flower pots and fountains come next, in the courtyard or on the ground floor, lit by one adult while everyone else stands back at least 3 metres.
Keep sky shots, if your association allows them, for the end of the permitted hours, and finish by 10 pm. Then the part everyone forgets: walk the area with a torch, drop every used wire and spent fountain into the water bucket, and leave it overnight before it goes into the bin. Most families need about two and a half hours, start to finish.
