A celebration of Diwali, India’s festival of lights, happened in Elk Grove on Monday night, with traditional Indian songs, dance and ceremonial clothing.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of people gathered for the annual five-day festival, which marks the darkest night on the Hindu calendar.<\/p>\n
“More than one million people across the world celebrate this festival,” said Bhavin Parikh, who organized the festival.<\/p>\n
California has the largest population of Indian Americans in the nation, and 12% of Elk Grove’s population identifies as having Indian ancestry.<\/p>\n
“We are one of the most diverse cities in the United States,” Mayor Bobbie Singh-Allen said. “We are a city that is welcome to all.”<\/p>\n
This year, there’s even more reason to celebrate. Just last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill making Diwali an official California state holiday.<\/p>\n
“We’re very excited,” Parikh said about Diwali becoming a state holiday. “I think this will help our kids to take time off to be with their families.”<\/p>\n
Another free Diwali celebration is taking place on Tuesday at 11 a.m. at the California State Capitol building in Sacramento.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A celebration of Diwali, India’s festival of lights, happened in Elk Grove on Monday night, with traditional Indian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3255,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,4107,4106],"class_list":["post-3254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-diwali","tag-elk-grove"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3254\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}