HOLI

Today is Holi! HAPPY HOLI!!!

A word of explanation about Holi:

Holi is a festival where people defy usual social boundaries and come together to throw water and coloured powder at one another. It is effectively a religiously sanctioned paint fight. Men drink bhang (a special lassi made with hash) and everyone eats these special sweets that are sort of like baklava and generally has a very good time. The festival is a play act of Krishna and Radha’s paint fight. Krishna supposedly asked his mother why Radha had such pale skin in comparison to his dark skin, as he was jealous of her complexion. His mother told him to go and paint radha a new colour if he was so jealous as a joke. But Krishna went and got some paint powder and covered Radha in it, causing her to retaliate, and so for the Holi play to happen. And that is why people celebrate Holi by throwing colours at each other.

 

Holi seems to be the time when the world goes mad. As soon as the girls got their hands on the colour, they went wild. Soon we were looking like those modern dancers, completely covered from head to foot in colour. It looked fantastic. And then someone managed to work out how to turn the hose on. And then people started playing in the fountains, and then the water was being poured over everyone, and so all the colours ran into one another. Some people managed to get so wet they got clean by the end of it. I was still a sort of pinky-red-purple colour by the time we were done. It was great fun. Everyone came together and just let inhibitions go, chucking colour and water and running around like loons. The pictures we have are brilliant.

The world outside was mad as well. We were actually locked in the hostel until half four in the afternoon for fear of our safety at the hands of bhang-fuelled revelers. Amanda and Shaina had wanted to go out to JNU in the morning, but they weren’t allowed onto the street. Thankfully we had more than enough fun by ourselves without going out. Lauren and Amanda went out at half four to get some juice and they said they met some men who were obviously completely high and were being verbally quite aggressive and scary. It made them realise that the hostel had a point about not letting us out. All the men who usually don’t speak to girls would have been so high from the bhang that they wouldn’t be scared of us at all. On the contrary, they would be violent and aggressive.

The other thing about Holi is that the colour makes you tired. Everyone who hasn’t had the colour on them says that the tiredness is just an after-effect of running about in the fresh air. But it isn’t the same sort of tired. It is an exhaustion that is mental as well as physical. You can’t think about anything, let alone try to do work or read. You just sleep. We slept for about five hours each and then woke up only to eat and go back to bed. I got no work done today. Not for want of trying, I just couldn’t concentrate at all. Incredibly weird feeling.

Despite the strange narcotic paint, I feel that Holi needs to become a regular feature of my life. I am going to make everyone play it on the Meadows next spring. It is just too good to not keep it up.