Understanding Onam: What Is the Pookalam Teaching Us About Ourselves?

Many Hindu festivals, rituals, epics and scriptures carry layers of meaning beneath their outer forms. They were not necessarily meant to be mindless repetition; much of their wisdom was transmitted through practice rather than through a classroom. Strip away the ceremony and what remains can be a remarkably practical way of thinking about life, nature and ourselves. Science and spirituality may use different vocabularies, but both can lead us towards the same questions about balance, interdependence and existence. Perhaps recognising those connections—and living by them—is part of the purpose of this human birth.

Onam is no exception. Last year, in this series, we looked at Onam through the story of Mahabali and the themes of ego and attachment. This year, we look at it through something that appears quietly at the doorstep each morning of the festival: the Pookalam.

1. The Flower and the Flood: Balance as the First Lesson

The traditional Pookalam was not simply a collection of purchased flowers. It was built, flower by flower, from what grew around the community—starting in many traditions with Thumba on the first day, followed over the succeeding days by flowers such as Mukkutti, Thechi, Kannanthali and Krishnakireedam, along with other locally available species.

To gather these flowers, you had to know the land. You had to notice where each species grew, when it flowered and whether it was flowering at all. In a sense, every household became an informal observer of the local landscape.

If familiar flowers became harder to find, that was information. Something in the surrounding environment may have changed.

That connection with the natural world matters even more today. Fewer native species survive in many landscapes, while contemporary Pookkalams increasingly use commercially available flowers such as marigolds and chrysanthemums brought in from elsewhere. At a larger scale, ecological degradation has made landscapes more vulnerable to problems ranging from biodiversity loss and soil degradation to flooding, erratic rainfall and crop stress.

The Pookalam quietly makes the same point at a personal scale - Just as an ecosystem depends on balance among its many elements, our own inner ecosystem depends on balance too—in what we eat, what we consume and what we allow into our minds. A body constantly subjected to excess eventually struggles to function well. A mind fed a steady diet of noise, anger and negativity can become similarly disturbed.

And the Pookkalam is not created in one moment. It grows, one flower at a time, over the course of the festival.

That pace itself carries a lesson: balance is built gradually, not seized all at once.

2. The Joy of Gathering: Community as Medicine

Foraging for flowers was rarely only a solitary activity. It could become a shared one—children walking alongside grandparents, neighbours comparing what they had found, families returning home with baskets and stories.

There is something deeply restorative about people showing up for one another.

Ideas are exchanged. Households support each other. Laughter happens without being scheduled. We do not need elaborate clinical language to recognise the value of human connection. Spend an unhurried morning with people you love, working towards something together, and you may return lighter than you left.

That lightness can spread through a family, a street and an entire community preparing for the same festival.

Everything else about Onam—the Onasadya, games, visits and gatherings—extends this same spirit. The Pookkalam is simply where the day begins: joy that multiplies because it was never meant to be experienced alone.

3. The Quiet Knowledge Woven Into the Petals

The flowers associated with the Pookkalam were not chosen only for colour and beauty. Several of them also have documented histories of use in Kerala's traditional medical practices.

That history is worth recognising for what it is: a record of traditional knowledge passed through generations. It should not automatically be treated as proof of clinical efficacy by modern scientific standards.

The precise historical reasons for choosing every particular flower may not always be recoverable. But the ritual clearly brought people into repeated contact with flowers, plants, seasons and the natural environment around them.

The practice came first. The explanation may come later—or may remain partly unknown.

That is often how traditional knowledge survives: through observation, repetition and transmission across generations.

Seen this way, the Pookkalam was not merely an arrangement of flowers. It was also a way of making people pay attention to the natural world at their doorstep.

4. No Role Is Without Meaning

Look closely at a finished Pookalam and you will notice something about its design: even the smallest flowers have a place.

The tiny white Thumba can sit as deliberately within the design as a larger, more striking flower. Remove even a small element and the pattern changes.

That can be read as more than decoration—as a statement about how a whole is built.

Whether one sees it as having a place in the eyes of God or simply a place in the fabric of society, the idea is similar: every person occupies a position in the larger picture, and no contribution is beneath value.

No one is without purpose.

A society, like a Pookkalam, is diminished when it treats any of its members as dispensable.

5. Vamana's Three Steps: Environment, Feelings and the Ego We Must Surrender

The festival's culmination—the story of Vamana and Mahabali—can be read as carrying this same architecture further, one step at a time.

Vamana, in his dwarf form, asks Mahabali for only three paces of land.

We can read those three steps not merely as a measurement of space, but as an invitation to think about the spaces we occupy—outside us and within us.

The first step covers the physical earth.

This is the environment we actually inhabit—the same ground that the Pookkalam asks us to observe and appreciate in the opening lesson.

The second step covers the heavens.

We can read this as the inner terrain—the feelings we carry, the emotions we project onto ourselves and the emotional consequences we create for others through our words and judgments.

It is the emotional weather system within which we live.

The third step finds no space left to cover.

And this is where Mahabali offers his own head—the only thing left to give.

It can be understood as the surrender of Ahamkara, the ego that insists on being right, on holding ground, on possessing and on being owed something.

This surrender was not meant only as an abstract offering to God.

It has a practical relevance to human relationships as well.

We have all seen what an unyielding ego can do: a family stops speaking, a friendship quietly ends, a workplace fractures, a community turns against itself.

Very often, such breakdowns do not begin with a disagreement that is truly impossible to resolve.

They begin when someone is unwilling to take the third step—unwilling to recognise that there is no more space left for the ego to occupy.

Sometimes the most dignified thing left to offer is simply to let go.

6. Even the Ash Is of Use

By evening, the Pookkalam begins to fade. By the next morning, it may be cleared away entirely.

But the flowers do not become meaningless because their beauty has ended. They are organic matter. They can decompose and return to the soil, becoming part of another cycle of life.

And here the Pookkalam offers us a remarkably human lesson.

Our own bodies are part of the same cycle.

The body is made of the elements of nature and, after death, returns to those elements. In traditions that follow cremation, the remaining ash too is traditionally returned to nature—often to the earth or water, according to the customs of the family and community.

The form changes.

The purpose does not disappear.

A flower blooms, fades and returns to the earth.

A human being is born, lives, ages and eventually returns to the elements.

We often think usefulness is something we earn early in life and gradually lose towards its end. The Pookkalam suggests another way of seeing it.

Every stage has its own place.

The bloom has its purpose.

The fading has its place.

The falling apart has its place.

And what remains after us can become part of something beyond us.

Perhaps that is one of the quietest lessons hidden in the Pookkalam: we are not meant to hold on to our form forever. We are meant to participate in the larger cycle of which we are already a part.

The instruction is available to us now—not only at the end of life.

Be useful.

Know your place in the larger design.

Care for the environment.

Care for one another.

Build slowly.

Gather together.

And when the time comes, know when to set the ego down.

That, in the end, may be what the Pookalam has been trying to tell us—not through a sermon, but through a flower placed at the door each morning.

Happy Onam.

Dr. Kumaresh Krishnamoorthy Part of the "Understanding Hinduism" series