I missed Diwali, the ‘festival of lights’ and most important Indian festival, by a week or so. A cause of major celebration, Diwali is celebrated with great enthusiasm by residents. But I missed the earthshaking firecrackers and complete chaos of lights and lamps and exploding bottle rockets that fill the streets each evening this year. Still, it seems there’s always cause for a celebration, at least in Mysore. On Sunday there was a small festival, whose honorary deity or event I never quite grasped, that saw the town’s rickshaw drivers dressing up their vehicles in flowers, palm fronds and banana leaves, and locals setting up shrines and stages in front of banks and down side streets. It meant a canceled afternoon outing due to a dearth of rickshaw drivers and a hard night’s rest as a combination of live acts and tracks blared late into the night. Likewise, some folks evidently kept some of those Diwali firecrackers for such an occasion. All well and good for the local residents but a little distracting for foreign yoga students who had a 4:30 a.m. led class. Thank god for strong chai.
Deborah Crooks (www.DeborahCrooks.com) is a writer, performing songwriter and recording artist based in San Francisco whose lyric driven and soul-wise music has drawn comparison to Lucinda Williams, Chrissie Hynde and Natalie Merchant.
Singing about faith, love and loss, her lyrics are honed by a lifetime of writing and world travel while her music draws on folk, rock, Americana and the blues. She released her first EP “5 Acres” in 2003 produced by Roberta Donnay, which caught the attention of Rocker Girl Magazine, selecting it for the RockerGirl Discoveries Cd. In 2007, she teamed up with local producer Ben Bernstein to complete “Turn It All Red” Ep, followed by 2008’s “Adding Water to the Ashes” CD, and a second full-length CD “2010. She’s currently working on a third CD to be released in 2013.
Deborah’s many performance credits include an appearance at the 2006 Millennium Music Conference, the RockerGirl Magazine Music Convention, IndieGrrl, at several of the Annual Invasion of the GoGirls at SXSW in Austin, TX, the Harmony Festival and 2009’s California Music Fest, MacWorld 2010, Far West Fest and many other venues and events. She toured the Northwest as part “Indie Abundance Music, Money & Mindfulness” (2009) with two other Bay Area artists, and followed up with “The Great Idea Tour of the Southwest in March 2010 with Jean Mazzei.
