Thain thain: The e-age gave wings ’n’warts, we’ve taken it all. For lungs’ sake, yield to e-crackers too 

For north India – gasping with a bad air day every Diwali – it would be better if the lights and sounds of the festival could receive an electronic form. One certainly hopes e-crackers can make a big bang this season, thanks to Supreme Court strictures on polluting firecrackers. Its remote controlled button without the whole shebang – the multi-sensory experience, the smoky delights of firecrackers – may be a downer for some. But let’s face it, the e-’s keep getting better and the ayes to them keep growing louder. Ask electronic gamers.

E-mail and e-greetings have all but replaced letters and greeting cards and e-cigs claim to deliver the nicotine fix without the smoke and chemicals in paper cigarettes. The bottomline: Down with nostalgia. The Android play store is also a pray store: among its offerings are hundreds of mobile apps delivering e-pujas, hymns, shlokas and prayers to nearly every deity in the vast Hindu pantheon. The lakhs of downloads for these apps say it: the e-cracker is here to burst, not to fizzle out.

But e-cracker downloads to Indian homes will be slow without some 5G-speed decision making by government. E-crackers cost a bomb – Rs 1,600 a box – and no surprises here, a bit like our Ganesha miniatures, the Chinese are the only ones making them right now. A government lab claims to have cracked the e-cracker code but until we see it burning up in Sivakasi’s fir-e-works industries let’s just go “thain thain” as some people plan to this Diwali. Farm-to-factory may have gone bust but let’s get cracking on lab-to-factory. Imagine a Diwali easy on blackened lungs, jangled nerves and coarsened air in your head. Switching on the e-cracker may not be the sensory trigger a firecracker is. But it’s become the sensible thing to do.