Here is your short paragraph on Kali Puja:

Kali, the goddess is the Shakti of Siva. She is called by names including Sati, Parvati, Durga, Uma, Bhavani.

From the mythical point of view she represents the supreme realization of truth, the state beyond manifestation. She also symbolizes eternal time and hence she both gives life and destroys it.

She is depicted as a hideous four-armed emaciated woman with fang-like teeth, who devours all beings.

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She holds a pasa (noose), Khatvanga (skull-topped staff), Khadga (sword) and a severed head. The weapons denote her powers of destruction; the severed head, that there is no escape from time and that individual lives and deaths are merely minute episodes in the time continuum.

This is also the significance of her association with crematoria and burial grounds. Her naked­ness indicates that she has stripped off all the veils of existence and the illusion (maya) arising them. Her only garment is space. Thus she is also described as black, the colour in which all distinctions are dissolved; or she is eternal night, in the midst of which she stands upon ‘non-existence’, the static but potentially dynamic state that precedes manifestation.

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The Unmanifest is represented by the corpse (sava) of Siva on which she stands. Her hands show the fear-removing (abhaya) and boon-granting (vara) mudras. The former indicates that she is able to allay the terrors of those who invoke her, because she understands their fears, the latter mudra indicates the bestowal, not of transient gifts, but of true perception leading to liberation (moksa). In northern India, group worship of Kali takes place in the month of Sravana (July-August) to get blessings of Goddess Kali.

The most sacred temple of Kali is ‘The Kalighat Temple’ located in a suburb south Calcutta. Its importance stems from the myth of Sati’s death, when her distraught husband Mahadeva (Siva) wandered about the world carrying his wife’s body and threatening to destroy the world, but Visnu intervened and with his chakra (discus) cut up Sati’s body into fifty-one pieces which fell to earth in various places, each place becoming sacred because imbued with Sati’s divine spirit.

Kali is worshipped in the midnight of the new moon and in Bengal the main celebration is during Diwali night.

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