Divali, Fireworks & Sleep Deprivation

For those of you who hadn't noticed today is Divali, the hindu Festival of Light. The Festival signifies the triumph of light over darkness, good over evil, justice over injustice and intelligence over ignorance. The goddess worshipped at Divali is Mother Lakshmi or Lakshmi Mata. Lakshmi Mata is the goddess of light, wealth and beauty and is also associated with prosperity, luck, riches, abundance, financial well being, and generosity.

Where I live Divali means fireworks, or more precisely, an obscene quantity of fireworks. For the past few days there have been sporadic sustained releases of fireworks and they have been annoying but today they have been going off non-stop since I arrived home this evening and it seems the entire national supply of fireworks are being used in my neighbourhood tonight!

Whilst I'm sure that the fireworks are very pretty (it is pissing with rain and I'm not going outside to check), the noise is infuriating. I now have a deep and meaninful understanding of how life must have felt like living in Beirut in the 1980s or more recently in Chechnya.

Anyway combined with the heavy air traffic at Heathrow tonight I am unable to get any sleep. So tomorrow I will be like a participant in Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment in the early 70s :(