East End residents celebrate Diwali, the ancient Hindu festival of lights

The East End’s ethnic Indian community celebrated India’s biggest holiday last night with food, music and dance at the Hotel Indigo in Riverhead.

Diwali, the “festival of lights” is an ancient Hindu festival celebrated in autumn in the northern hemisphere or spring in the southern hemisphere every year — and, for more than a decade, on the East End as well.

“It’s the equivalent of an Indian Christmas,” Rajesh Patel, a local doctor who cofounded the Indian Network of Eastern Long Island in 2003 with fellow physicians Dhiren Mehta and Prateek Dalal. “This is the biggest holiday the Indians have.”

With many dressed in traditional Indian garb, guests last night enjoyed a lavish spread of ethnic foods catered by Chowpatty, a New Jersey-based Indian caterer. The Bollywood celebrity band Musicsunita provided live music for dancing.

The ballroom itself was awash in streaming, colorful LED lights. The lights, Patel explained, represent a celebration of “good over evil.”

“During the festival of lights, we say, ‘Let there be new light and new beginning,’” he said.

The Diwali celebration is an annual fundraiser for the Indian Network of Eastern Long Island. The nonprofit group was established to reinforce and promote appreciation of Indian culture and traditions for Indian-American immigrants and, most especially, for their American-born offspring, Dalal said.

“We wanted to keep the culture going for our children,” Patel said. “We wanted to teach them what Hinduism is and what it entails.”

The group, referred to with affection as INELI by its members, gathers once a month at a Riverhead medical office for prayer and teaching.

“The nearest Hindu temple is in Queens,” he said. “We had to go all the way out there to gather and pray and all that stuff. It was very far.”

“There’s only a few of us around here,” Patel said. “There was nothing on the East End for us, so we decided to do it on our own.”

The meetings are always followed by by home-cooked ethnic dinners.

“INELI is love,” Raj Ghayalod, a 17-year-old Westhampton High School student and a first-generation Indian-American, told the crowd last night. He and other youths spoke about what the organization has meant to them growing up.

“Sometimes at first the lessons seemed boring,” Raj said. “But as I got older, I grew fascinated and tried to learn all I could about our culture and traditions. It taught me to love my culture, to be my culture. Without INELI I wouldn’t be the person I am today.”

Funds raised by INELI are donated to international organizations like Rotary, which with support from INELI build a school in an Indian village, Dalal said.

“We also support local food pantries,” Mehta said, noting that this year INELI is donating money for dozens of food baskets to be distributed by the Galilee Church of God in Christ in Riverside.

Another beneficiary of the group’s fundraising efforts has been the annual medical mission trip Patel and other doctors and nurses take to medically underserved parts of the world, Mehta said.. For years, Patel, a pulmonologist and surgeon, has voluntarily traveled all over the world on medical mission trips to poverty-stricken countries.