In the chaotic and blinding dazzle of Diwali celebrations in Mumbai, I searched for numbers that would help put a definiteness to it all. How large is the festival economy considering that Diwali is the motherlode of all festival spending? What is the gap between the topmost spenders and those at the bottom of the wealth pyramid? How has this inequality gap behaved in the past decade or in the past five years since the pandemic? And what can all this tell us about Mumbai’s society as it is today?

Searching for answers to such questions is like trying to find a quiet and no-smoke spot in the city that routinely goes berserk with firecrackers, shrugging off their impact on the worsening air quality and offering nonsensical explanations to justify the continued use of the stuff. Such a spot does not exist; even our homes are suffused with the lingering ‘firecracker air’. The rich and poor areas alike had Air Quality Index (AQI) in the ‘poor’ to ‘very poor’ and ‘hazardous’ categories on Diwali days this year too. And no amount of preening that ‘we in Mumbai have better AQI on post-Diwali days than Delhi does’ will help us in the long run.

That apart, it seemed that the firecracker market had seen no dampness at all; local media reported that there was an increase of at least 15 and 20 per cent in the prices of most firecrackers and that families had come to purchase with budgets ranging from Rs........

© Free Press Journal