Holy cow

First of all,

Happy Diwali to all my Indian friends. This picture was taken during the Diwali celebration of 2013 in Thiruverkadu, a suburb of Chennai, the largest city of South East India and capital of Tamil Nadu.

It depicts a pretty common sight, a cow roaming in the main street of the village by night. That was, though, a special night. Once a year, for a few days in a row, every one of the 650,000 villages and cities of India becomes a crazy stage of uninterrupted noisy explosions; it’s the Diwali festival, probably the most important festivity in the Hindu religion.

Officially the Festival of Lights, it symbolises the return to his people of Rama-Chandra, 7th incarnation of the God Vishnu. What does it mean in practice? Besides the usual gifts and Temple visits, Diwali became in the last decades the occasions to blow up tons of firecrackers, in a similar fashion to what happens in many areas of the world for the New Year. Just ten times as much.

This is great fun for everyone but can lead to many problems: littering, air pollution, people wounded and even killed and… Cows. All animals are actually affected by the unusual amount of lights and, especially, noise. While in the western world dogs are the main concern, Cows are for Indians as, you probably know, they are sacred.

The cow in the picture was probably an expert of the Diwali Extravaganza by the way it managed the noise, though few minutes before the picture was taken attempted to enter the shop in front. A jewellery. That explains the closed gate and the two youngsters patrolling the entrance.

Cows are anyway rewarded for standing the big chaos as one of the Diwali days is dedicated to them. This very cow is even luckier: being from the southern state of Tamil Nadu, will have another dedicated celebration in January: the Mattu Pongal.

Curiosity: if you really want, it is legal to eat cow meat in India. It will probably have to travel a bit, as slaughtering is only legal in south-west and north-east of the country. The legislation changes all the time and the topic became a very controversial and political one as the country leader Narendra Modi is trying to banish cattle slaughtering completely, opposed to the will of religious minorities and secular Hindus.