Click to play videoBhubaneswar (Orissa): Dried palm leaves, Bamboo stripes, and earthen pots. Ingredients so harmless. But that's till 55-year-old Banka Behari Jena adds in a dash of home made barood (gun powder) and these ordinary elements are all set for an extraordinary blast.
Incredible though it may sound to urban minds, in Balakati village near Bhubaneswar, it's a sight extremely common.
Banka himself has been making these rural crackers for a over 40 years now.
"In modern fancy crackers they take the help of machines and chemicals. But we make it all by hand which takes a longer time and more labour."
And Banka is not the only one. Dozens of villages in Orissa cater to the cracker demand and get to business atleast a month in advance.
A group of ten people like him can sell crackers worth at least Rs 30,000 in the ten days before Diwali and each make a profit of at least Rs 1,000 - money too less to feed their families throughout the year.
And even though individual profits remain meagre, the demand for these tradional crackers remain steep. That, despite competition with very fancy modern cousins.
Says a cracker stall owner, Prasanna Mallick, "We bring these rural crackers from villages and sell them. People still like them and they are much in demand."
With the government restriction on cracker-making licenses and strict safety norms, these traditional cracker makers are finding it hard to compete and harder still to keep their tradition alive.
However, in spite of all odds they are struggling hard to make the Diwali brighter for others.
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