From Pongal to Sankranti

Lured by the south Indian practices and with a keen sense of celebrating the festivals, I was brought up. Every year Pongal and Diwali are the most sought festivals which I keep an eye on. These are the festivals where we all get a long pause from work and spend time with family happily. I never realized the essence of love, the importance of family and being with them, until I joined my colleagues in a different city. Being away from home taught me many things. The values, family's importance, relationship, love and what life is all about. There is always a debate about whether money is an important thing in this world or not. Even I debate with myself many times about that. But no one never thought about debating whether family and their love is important or not! why because, we all know, damn that's a very important one.



So every year I was used to be with my family during this festival season. And I always reminded myself, wherever I go, I should be present at home for these festivals. But this year, the situation was not like that. As different travel needs emerged up, I was forced to cancel my festival trip to my home. This is the first year in my life, I am away from my home on the festival season. That gave me shivers over my spline whether this will become like this forever. Even I didn't know the next day is Pongal. My colleagues mentioned tomorrow is a holiday. Then only I remembered that.

This Pongal started as usual as another normal Sunday spent in the room. But here in Pune, the people were celebrating Sankranthi here. So I planned to witness the Sankranthi celebrations. I learned that kite flying, going to the temple and sharing sweets is the tradition here. As I observed, only women went in groups to temples. All the kids were enjoying kite flying. So, I thought I can also indulge in the Sankranti celebration. I flew kite with kids, well, almost after 8 years I did this. That gave me nostalgia for past memories. I thought the day will end as it is and I am satisfied over the kite flying. Then at night, to my surprise, my neighbour flat people gave sweets and rasam (I don't know what that is) but I enjoyed that. Well, this season, finally the day ended dropping down my regrets of not being at home.