Nilesh's Posterous - Filed under 'culture'

Divali, Festival of Lights (part 2)

Apart from sharing sweets and cakes to loved ones, for Divali, we also light up our houses to welcome goddess Laxmi.

Even though we are not celebrating this year, we did some prayers to Goddess Laxmi (picture 2) and put some earth lamps (picture 1) in every room in the house.

Quoted from wikipedia about significance of the lights - "Festival of Lights," where the lights or lamps signify victory of good over the evil within every human being."

Last year, my dad had decorated our house a lot with many decorations, the most he had ever done on the house. I've attached some pictures of my house (picture 3 and 4) decorated for Divali the year before.

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Filed under // culture divali festival hindu mauritius

Divali, Festival of Lights : Sharing of Sweets (part 1)

Divali (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali) is celebrated today in Mauritius and everybody cooks sweets and cakes that they share with all family, friends and neighbors. This year, I am not celebrating as it has not yet been 1 year since my father's passing away and we mourn for 1 year.

But we did get a fair share of sweets from family and friends and neighbors. I have not celebrated divali for a while in Mauritius and biggest change I see are that the cakes are very much more elaborate than they used to be and also people have started to use fancy decorated boxes to put the cakes in rather the little plastic or paper bags, we used to use when I was a kid. I've taken snaps of a couple of the boxes. They have very nice designs.

One thing that has not changed though is the traditional 'gato patate'. Its a cake made of sweet potatoes, flour, sugar and grated coconut filling and has been a traditional cake to cook for Divali. Mostly everybody had a 'gato patate' in their sweet bag.

For my Mauritian friends who are not in Mauritius at this time of the year, I've taken some pictures of what you are missing :)

I over indulged on the sweets today. Tomorrow diet starts :)