The Eternal Flame: What Deepavali Means Now
On the evening of Deepavali, as Dvaraka's lamps burned bright—millions of them now in a city that had grown vast—a child asked her grandmother: "Why do we light the lamps? Is it just a story about Krishna?"
The grandmother, who had been lighting Deepavali lamps for eighty years, sat quietly for a moment before answering. "It is a story," she said, "but not a story about the past. Every time we light these lamps, we are making a choice. We are saying: despite all the darkness—all the suffering, all the injustice, all the ways that people hurt each other—we choose to kindle light. We choose to believe that light is possible. We choose to gather together in that light and remember who we want to be."
"But won't the lamps just go out?" the child asked. "Yes," the grandmother replied, "and we will light them again. That is the whole point. The lamps do not burn forever—nothing does. But the commitment to rekindle them does. That is the work of community: to keep choosing, generation after generation, to create light rather than accept darkness."
On that same evening, across the city, the Deepavali gathering had become a festival unlike what Krishna or Pradyumna could have imagined—and yet entirely true to what they had begun. There were lamps of every kind, arranged in patterns that told stories. There were songs that had been written in recent years, songs about struggles faced and overcome, about injustices confronted and corrected, about the persistent effort to build a city of love. There were also moments of silence—time to remember those the city had failed, the people it had not yet learned to include, the possibilities it had not yet realized.
The festival had become what the best festivals are: a re-commitment rather than a celebration of achievement. For one night, the entire city was gathered around a simple truth: We choose this. We choose to light lamps. We choose to gather together. We choose to build something that works for all. We choose, again.
As the night deepened and the millions of lamps burned, the light they cast was so vast that it could be seen from great distances, from neighboring cities and distant lands. And in those places, people saw the light and wondered what it meant. Some came to visit Dvaraka, to learn what had created such radiance. Others were inspired to kindle similar lights in their own cities. The light spread not through conquest but through inspiration—people everywhere recognizing in that flame something they had always wanted to create but had never believed possible.