The air in NCR has turned amber in October – part smog, part myth. The streets near shopping centres smell faintly of burnt sugar and diesel: the markets have been aglow this fortnight, reminding you of tempers that have darkened over a decade, and Diwali has arrived like a national sedative.

This year, we shopped as though it might save us – from punishing EMIs, from the dread of another ‘NRC’, from credit card and other debts, from the politics that divide our dinner tables and the silences that follow them. People bought cars, three-wheelers and bikes, gold and silver coins (getting less for more thanks to leaps in precious metal prices) and hope. It became a shared ritual of forgetting – a festival of lights powered by the art of denial.

Layoffs in the corporate sector can be brushed aside for now. TCS, for example, plans to let go of staffers. Nestle has announced job cuts (globally). And there are others. In September, unemployment, which had been slowly recovering since the pandemic (the rate around 7.3% in July) showed a slight uptick, and women bore the brunt – as always.

Each missed salary and jobless day isn’t just a number – it’s a whisper of instability in kitchens and living rooms, where calculations are made of whether to spend or save. And more often than not, this festive season, that whisper has nudged us towards the nearest mall or app, seeking the control we no longer experience.

The finance minister’s office would have us believe that the markets are twinkling brighter than ever. Nirmala Sitharaman cites record sales as proof that India is spending. That the festive mood has even translated into fiscal strength – it will reflect in our GDP figures.

Well, why wouldn’t it? So will the layoffs, high unemployment and the sudden tightening of our social security nets. Look at the EPFO: withdrawals now easier for the employed but tougher for the jobless. Retirement funds delayed by at least a year after superannuation. The recently laid-off to wait twelve months for their own money. A quiet preparation, perhaps for tumultuous, sorry, “dynamic” times ahead?

And yet, we shop. Not because we feel secure, not because the numbers reassure us, but because buying cars, lamps, gadgets, gold, silver, offers the illusion of fulfillment. That we can still, sometimes, throw caution to the wind and hope for a better tomorrow.

Diwali is the festival of Goddess Laxmi in the north, who demands spending and promises returns. Her presence always lingers in the minds of shoppers, nudging them towards ritual, indulgence, as well as future planning – like buying gold for the approaching wedding season. But when the government promotes a shopping festival, each purchase also becomes a small assertion of normalcy, routine, defiance against the chaos that hovers over the country and our bank accounts.

This is Modi’s India in miniature: a country where optimism is packaged as spending, where faith in markets can outweigh faith in institutions and where every festival seems to carry a state-backed nudge toward consumption.

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Credit card usage has surged; over 10 crore Indians now swipe more than they save. Credit card delinquency has jumped over 44% in a year, from Rs 23,000 crore to over Rs 33,000 crore in March. ‘Compensatory consumption,’ psychologists and marketers call it; the impulse to buy your way out of dread.

Fittingly, this Diwali season has been given a new name: GST Bachat Utsav or the Savings Festival. The government says it “closely monitored” the sales of 54 daily-use items whose GST rates were revised on September 22. And yes, it can confirm: prices fell on most of them!

So what if you didn’t shop, you might think, as you drive past a decked-up mall or market. Despite rising debt, fragile jobs, simmering anxieties someone is swiping, carting and gifting their way through Diwali, even if it isn’t you. You ignore the voice that reminds you that just one Diwali cracker can reverberate through a housing society, and doesn’t mean everybody is celebrating.

Or you may well be one to say: the majboori versus mauj story is a timeless one. There will always be the pathetically struggling, but there’s the quiet comfort of looking at the good things you’ve got. You are promoted, by the big spenders around you and the government, to forget, momentarily, that wealth is not a lifestyle choice but a result of structural advantage and policy choices.

Perhaps such forgetting is the silver lining after all. Middle-class consumers, battered by constant updates about politics, scandals, violence and inequality are experiencing outrage fatigue. They’re numbed to it all: lynchings of Muslims and Dalits, cracker pollution, the endless moral alarm. The marketplace has become their sanctuary amidst fractured families and overheated politics.

But then the finance ministry says Central Public Sector Enterprises must not spend on Diwali gifts (or gifts for other festivals), in the “interest of economy”. Pandemic-era austerity, it seems, is back. That makes you wonder, contradictory to the signal to spend: are we in a crisis?

From the perspective of households, there’s reason to worry: debt per individual rose 23%, from Rs 3.9 lakh crore to Rs 4.9 lakh crore in two years to March 2025. If people are buying, you start to think, it must be less about celebration and more about asserting that life is, somehow, manageable.

But that, too, can be ignored for now.

After all, festive cheer and these incentives are the architecture of modern consumption. In Modi’s India, the market is a moral compass as much as a convenience. And it’s all perfectly arranged for the GDP growth story we’ll be reading right after Holi next year.

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Interestingly, the finance minister has stressed that the GST Bachat Utsav will have the “unintended” or “collateral” benefit of helping those hit by United States tariffs on Indian goods. Is this a hint at targeted relief for exporters? Or is it simply a nod to middle-class buyers that they can go ahead with air conditioners, tech goods and apparel just because they cost less right now?

Sure, the government may forgo Rs 48,000 crore in revised GST rates, but the burst of festive sales between late September and October, it says, will make up for it. So what, then, is the economy gaining, you may wonder? Motion and vitality, or the appearance of both?

As for exporters, affected sectors “would have” approached their respective ministries, Sitharaman has said, which are now “working on packages.”

Even as markets glow, parts of India smoulder. In Ladakh, four protestors were killed last month while demanding statehood and constitutional protection – a reminder that not everyone feels the same way in “Amrit Kaal,” where the top 1% holds 40% of the wealth and everyone else subsists on what’s left.  In Cuttack, Durga Puja processions turned into communal clashes. Homes burned. Curfews followed.

The country that celebrates light is, in so many ways, walking through showers of sparks. Maybe that’s why the malls glitter louder each year. We need the distraction, the illusion of order, the hum of commerce to drown out the sound of disquiet.

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