Random Photos: Making of a Rangoli

We made a rangoli on diwali and I put up a series of photographs up in my blog. Its not straightforward to make one blog entry with multiple photos, so each photo is one blog. Hence better to just visit here to see the series.

Sugendha used suji to make the rangoli and colored it with organice colors. I think rangoli is mainly a south indian tradition. Bengali's have a tradition of alpana (it is primarily white) but punjab etc doesn't seem to have any such tradition. And it has a strange association with diwali because they don't celebrate diwali in the south!

Atleast in karnataka they celebrate naraka chaturdashi a day before diwali - thats the day krishna killed the demon narakasur, then they celebrate balipadyam the day after diwali - that's the day Bali was stepped on by Vaman and sent to Patal. What is stranger to me is that supposedly Ram spent a lot of time in south india and rameshwaram is the southernmost part of india but diwali and worship of ram seems missing here. Vishnu is worshipped but in other forms. There seems to be some major differences in the mythology of north and south too but I think I need to do some more research on this.