Go Festive
This year during the Navratra’s try to get into the spirit of the season by revamping your home or even your office/cubicle or desk. The idea is to feel the positive vibes that festivity brings and share with the people around you. For these few auspicious weeks, regardless of your faith, it is the feel good factor that calls for a change, so do think about it. Both the scale and the expense are completely up to you. These 9 days of reverence lead up to three months of cross cultural, cross border celebration and prayer. It starts with Diwali, the festival of lights, Eid, then comes Christmas, New Year, Lodi and the list is endless. This is the true joy of living in a secular state. So however you perceive it, this is the time to live it up.
Start with a space; it could be a room, a corner, a desk or your entire cubicle. Once you have selected the area designated for a spruce up, look for inspiration. You don’t have to look far, ask any resident of Ahmedabad and they will tell you how it’s done!
We will give you three simple and different decor ideas for this year:
The Dandiya Look
All you need here is colourful ‘dandiya’s’, ‘few thali’s’, a ‘rangoli’ stencil and colours. Now get to work. Finalize a base, is it the wall or the floor, the floor is a better idea in terms of visuals and of course the unavoidable, cleaning up. Arrange the ‘dandiya’s’ in a pattern, depending upon how many you have, I like to make a diamond shape with 4 ‘dandiya’s’. In the centre, I make a multi coloured ‘rangoli’, beside it I keep a fully arranged ‘thali’, except that I use wax or artificial flowers and foil wrapped chocolates. This is the corner I will create for this Navratri, where all the visitors to my house can have a piece of chocolate and get into the mood.
The Essence of Prayer
Collect some seashells, a small bag full of clean sand, a wooden tray, exotic incense sticks (like vanilla, ylang ylang or ‘mogra’), small white polished stones and a big diya. Here you can create your own combination of a Zen garden and a ‘puja pandal’, both miniaturized. Use the tray to make a sand base, decorate the sand with seashells and few stones, and use a Zen garden rake or even a fork to make calming tracks in the sand. Use one corner for the incense sticks and the ‘diya’, every evening as dusk falls, light the ‘diya’ and the incense and watch your home get the glow of light and fragrance of nature.
Lights and Flowers
This set up is ideal on a side table, lobby table or sideboard. You need to spare this space for good ten days, so be sure of where you do this arrangement. You will need an assortment of lighting objects like candles, ‘diyas’, tea lights, miniature candle holders along with small artificial flowers. Colour coordinate if you like, it is fun to experiment with unusual festive combos like blue and silver. Make a wave shape with the flowers, behind the flowers arrange the lights, once they are all lit, you won’t be able to tell the shape, so make this a random arrangement. Every evening, watch the table light up your home completely
Note: please be careful when you use candle, ‘diyas’ etc. make sure they are not near inflammables like curtains, books, upholstery etc. make sure the base you use, like table, floors etc. can take the heat and never leave lit candles and incense sticks, unsupervised.
