A Simple Onam Celebration Is Still a Real Onam

Around the middle of August my ad accounts wake up. Festival creative goes into review, budgets get raised, and every local business I run campaigns for wants their posts live before Atham. Onam is a fortnight away now, so most of that work is already done.

Which means the photos you’ll scroll past for the next two weeks were shot in July.

I do this for a living, so I see the feed from the production side. It’s a different view. When a perfect sadya shows up on your phone at nine in the morning, you see a family eating well. I see a shoot that was scheduled, styled, approved, and paid for.

The Onam in your feed was planned weeks ago

Festival advertising doesn’t happen during the festival. It can’t. The creative has to be finished, revised, and scheduled before the season starts, because everyone in the business is with their own family by then.

So the sadya on the leaf was plated for the camera and went cold before anyone touched it. The house is often not the client’s house. The children in the frame are often not related to anyone in the shop. None of this is dishonest. It’s just how advertising gets made, and everybody who makes it knows.

The problem is where it lands. That photo sits in your feed at the same size, in the same scroll, between your cousin’s actual Onam and your neighbour’s. Your eye doesn’t sort them into paid and real. Mine only does because I know what a shoot day costs to put together.

The real photos are edited too

Organic posts do the same thing with no budget at all.

Forty frames, one posted. The pookalam gets photographed early, while it’s still tight and damp, not in the afternoon when half of it has scattered. Nobody posts the argument about whose house to visit first. Nobody posts the cousin who didn’t come this year.

I’ve done it myself. I’ve reshot a plate of food because the first photo looked flat, and I wasn’t even posting it for a client. On its own it’s harmless. Multiply it across a few hundred accounts in your feed and you get a version of Onam that no household in Kerala actually lives in.

You end up comparing your ordinary Tuesday against everyone else’s best frame out of forty. You’ll lose that comparison every year. It’s built to be lost.

What Onam actually costs, and what it doesn’t

Look at where the money goes during the season. Clothes, gold, furniture, a resort booking, a bigger sadya order. Almost all of it goes to things that photograph well.

Now ask anyone about an Onam they still remember. You’ll get the aunt who sang, the walk to the temple in the evening, the year the whole family was in one house, the payasam somebody’s grandmother made. Almost none of it is the expensive part.

Flowers for a small pookalam cost very little, and the ones from your own yard cost nothing at all. A sadya with eight items on the leaf is a sadya. An old mundu that fits properly looks better than a new one that doesn’t. If money is tight this year, and for a lot of families it is, nothing you’re cutting is the part that makes it Onam.

If this year is a smaller one

Some years are just smaller. Someone is working through the holiday. Someone is unwell. Someone is in Bangalore or the Gulf and couldn’t get leave. The money went where it had to go.

That isn’t a failed Onam. It’s a normal one. Every family has had a few.

Make the pookalam you have flowers for. Cook the things you actually like eating instead of the full list. Call the person you keep meaning to call. Sit with whoever is in the house and stay there a while.

And if the scrolling starts making your own house feel thin, put the phone down for the day. I say that as someone whose income depends on you picking it back up.

The part nobody posts

The best hour of Onam is usually after the sadya, when everyone is too full to move and the conversation slows down and nobody is doing anything in particular. It doesn’t photograph. There’s nothing to look at.

That’s the hour I’d protect this year. Everything else on the list is optional.