Holi India!

That’s not a typo my friends, just a bad pun that I couldn’t resist. This past Sunday people from all over India, young and old, ¨played Holi¨. This really unique tradition consists of covering each other in colors. These colors usually are powders called ¨gulal¨ and ¨abeer¨ or powder mixed with water that everyone gleefully tosses by hand, throws via water balloon, squirts from bottles or shoots at one another via water guns.

I was wondering prior to Sunday how you ¨played Holi¨, as everyone says. Are there rules? Is there any structure to playing Holi? Or is it complete chaos?

It’s complete chaos.

Now, the basic exchange of colors on one another can actually be quite peaceful and touching. While walking to the university, where we started the day, the first colors put on us were from some people from an extremely poor area of shacks and makeshift homes. They greeted us saying ¨Happy Holi¨ and then put colors on our foreheads or cheeks and then gave us hug. At the university, it was a little crazier scene, to say the least. It is said that, ¨No other festival gives so much liberty to the people to let their hair loose and enjoy their hidden crazy self.¨ Almost every male person’s t-shirt was ripped off sooner or later where we were. There is lots of dancing, spontaneous group singing, and basically all around merriment. Almost anything goes.

As the day goes on and peoples´ bodies become that much filthier, the range of items people use to cover each other expands to include mud and pretty much anything else you can find to smear on one another.

Now the history around this holiday is a little fuzzy as I had a difficult time getting much of an answer from my work mates as to why we cover each other in all these colors, but why let a little history complicate a really fun tradition, right? After a little research, I learned that people from all over India celebrate different Hindi legends associated with ¨Holi¨. You can learn more about this amazingly unique festival at http://www.holifestival.org/.