Lighting up lives,with earthen lamps

Every year,Saraf presents around 10,000 lamps decorated by him to people belonging to a cross-section of the society. The list includes celebrities,too. In the past six years,he had presented lamps to personalities like Lata Mangeshkar,Pt Ravi Shankar,Pt Bhimsen Joshi,Pt Hariprasad Chaurasia,Medha Patkar,Shivajirao Bhosale,Vinda Karandikar,Mangesh Padgaonkar and Dajeekaka Gadgeel.

“It all started with an inspiration from my teacher late CM Omkar. During Diwali,whenever I used to visit my relatives or friends,I used to present them an earthen lamp. Once Omkar sir told me: Your intention is good,then why don’t you make these lamps more memorable so that they can be preserved? The idea struck a chord in me,” he says.

Saraph then tried different forms of lamps,started painting it and began to write messages on it. “In 2004,I created a model of war memorial using lamps,wrote two lines of a Marathi poem on jawans and presented it to a family of a shahid jawan whom I knew. They liked the concept and are preserving it even now. Then,I started making such models on different themes.”

“What I like the most about these earthen lamps is the cultural value they have. They are made up of ash and sand but they soothe our soul when they are lit.”

And every Diwali,Saraf is immersed in decorating lamps at his 200-sq ft flat in Sumangal building in Shukrawar Peth. He doesn’t care or count the money he spends on buying thousands of earthen lamps from Kumbhar Wada,acrylic colours he uses to paint them or other stationery required. Though it is difficult to accommodate all these things in a small home,he is happy that he can light up the souls of others.