Diwali preparation has a rhythm most households in Assam know well: cleaning the house, planning the sweets and snacks, buying puja essentials, and somewhere in there, discovering you're out of three things at once on the day itself. Here's how to plan festive grocery shopping so the last-minute scramble is smaller.
Start with what actually needs advance planning
Some purchases genuinely benefit from being bought early - dry fruits and nuts for gifting or sweets, oil and ghee in the quantities festive cooking demands, and any packaged sweets or namkeen you're buying rather than making. These don't spoil quickly, so there's no downside to ordering them a week or more ahead.
Leave the fresh and last-minute items for closer to the day
Fresh produce, dairy for last-minute cooking, and puja items you realize you're missing while actually setting up are exactly where quick delivery earns its place. Rather than a frantic trip to a crowded market on Diwali morning, these are the kind of gaps a 30-minute delivery is built for.
Plan around the crowds, not just the calendar
Markets and kirana stores are predictably busiest in the two or three days directly before Diwali. If you can shift even part of your shopping - especially the heavier, non-perishable items - to a week or more earlier, you avoid both the crowds and the risk of a particular item selling out.
A simple festive shopping split
- 1-2 weeks ahead: dry fruits, packaged sweets, oil, ghee, decorative and gifting items.
- 2-3 days ahead: cleaning supplies, non-perishable puja items, snacks for guests.
- Day of, or the evening before: fresh produce, dairy, anything you discover you're missing while cooking.
That last category is where an app like Raftaar is most useful during the festive season - not for the big planned shop, but for catching everything that planning inevitably misses.