“Cracker business is in a precarious state now. With all the protests and talks, more than 1300 factories have been shut down in Sivakasi. That has led to the unemployment of more than 8 lakh people, who only know one thing – making crackers. In the last couple of years, we’ve also seen a drop in the sales. This is an ancestral business, and I’m the 5th generation taking care of it. Earlier, people would burst crackers from Dussehra to Diwali. When I was a child, my cousins and I would spend holidays bursting crackers and flying kites. Nowadays, children are only into video games and nobody wants crackers. Having said that, I’m not trying to brush off the fact that crackers do add to pollution. We have organisations trying to make crackers that leave very minimal smoke. But I know that’s still not going to take us back to the kind of business we made years ago. I want to be the last generation in my family doing this. My children are studying and I hope they choose other paths and not this business because this is going to end soon.”

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