For six years now, Anand Saraf has been celebrating Diwali in a manner he knows best — by spreading light in the lives of many, especially jawans fighting on the border. He sends earthen lamps (panati) to them based on different themes.

Saraf terms these lamps Kavyadeep or poetic lamps with messages written on them. The message is generally four lines of an appropriate poem depending on the personality to whom the lamps are gifted. And he calls his act a “deepdan”, a part of Indian culture without any commercial aspect.

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.”

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