IT is the biggest festival on the Hindu calendar when hundreds of people come together to celebrate renewed hope, friendship and goodwill.

Today is Diwali, the festival of lights, and the city’s Hindus and Sikhs were this morning waking up to the most exciting day of the year.

Southampton’s Vedic Society Hindu Temple will tonight invite more than 200 worshippers for a spectacular display of colourful fireworks from 8.30pm to mark the first day of the five-day festival ahead of the Hindu and Sikh New Year celebrations tomorrow.

The occasion celebrates the victory of good over evil, light over darkness and knowledge over ignorance.

From 9.15pm tonight the temple’s priest will lead a prayer ceremony where the city’s businessmen and other worshippers will pray for a successful year and seek the blessing of the goddess of wealth Lakshmi.

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Throughout the day excited children and adults dressed in new clothes, exchanged gifts and sweets and spent valuable family time in their homes intricately decorated with rows of lamps. Children also asked for the blessing of their elders.

The lamps, which represent a new beginning, are lit to help the goddess of wealth Lakshmi into people’s homes and they also celebrate one of the Diwali legends, which tells of the return of Rama and Sita to Rama’s kingdom after fourteen years of exile.

Dhurjati Shukla, assistant secretary of the temple, said the event was a great opportunity for people to forgive and forget to start again for the following year.

He said: “It is the highlight of the whole year. It marks the past year and the beginning of the New Year, that is the why there is so much excitement.

“Occasionally knowingly or unknowingly we do make our mistakes in life whether it is immediate family or elsewhere. This is the time when you forgive and forget all of these things and celebrate the whole event as a unity.

“It is the time that marks not only the beginning of the year but also marks the beginning of a new relationship with everyone.”

Worshippers will gather again tomorrow at the temple on Radcliffe Road, Northam, to wish each other a happy start to the Hindu New Year. Families will help to make a feast of more than 200 vegetarian curries which will be offered to goddess Lakshmi and then enjoyed by the city’s different faiths at 7.30pm.