Started off on Saturday night with Maharashtra Mandal, Diwali Dandiya.
Sunday night went to Nilam-Sarven's house for a big Diwali bash. They had a beautiful house, just perfect for parties. Really large back porch/sitting area and yard. The first picture is from their house. Lady next to me in light blue punjabi dress is Nilam.
On Tuesday, we celebrated Lakmi Poojan at Vishal-Janki's new house. Together they had cooked a lot of food. Janki had set up pooja, her mom had sent her a lot of pooja sahitya (accessories) from Atlanta. Below is the whole setup by Janki the superwoman of that day. She worked half day at IBM, setup this pooja and cooked a whole lot of delicious food in the other half of the day.Side note(so that Vishal doesn't get mad at me) - He made the puris.
We started off the pooja at the 7:40PM muhurta. For Lakmi Poojan, hindus pray to the godess Lakmi i.e. the godess of money/prosperity. We started off with Chopda Poojan by writing names/prayers etc. on the front page of each book. Chopdi is a book in Gujarathi, they use these books for accounting for the rest of the year.
I remember as a kid we used to perform this pooja at my dad's office on his table. I dont remember doing such an elaborate lakmi poojan in a long time, thanks to Janki got this opportunity.
Below is a snap during the pooja. As you can see all the blank books have god names on them in Kunku in this picture.
Right after the pooja before attacking the food...
And finally the real reason for celebrating Diwali......
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