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Wednesday, March 03, 2010

The Times of Holi - Edition 1

Sometime in 1996, somewhere in Chhattisgarh

“Bhaiya kuch fugge (balloon) dena, arre yeh nahi, who paani waale”

“Lo Beta, 5rs ke 100, rang wagera chahiye”

“nahi bhaiya, who le liya, Thank you”

Tomorrow is Holi time, this time it has fallen in between the exam, but we will play. Holi requires hell lot of preparations and we are all ready for that. I have my entire arsenal ready,

  • 2 packets of Gulaal- my favourite- Yellow and Violet, the weirdest of combos
  • 2 packs of water waala colour, 1 Solid (choti bottle), one regular in both red & green
  • This year I have given away with pichkari, no use, small streams of water are of no use, metal pichkaris as shown in Sholay are not good too. Me and my friends have come up with a set of plastic bottles, cut & twisted to form nice pichku devices with maximum impact
  • Fuggas which need to be made into chotu hand grenades filled with water color
  • A set of old clothes, the only festival in the world where o0ne wears that. Although on television nowadays they show people wearing Super White clothes on Holi I think it’s a stupid idea. Every year this was the day when we dispatched our worst clothes (mostly torn by EOD). Although one of my friends use to wear the same trouser every year for holi (something which I tried on later)
I woke up early, and we did a small pooja at home. Post that I applied Parachute Nariyal Tel on my body & face and hair. A yucky feeling but its ok, as everyone says it will help in removing the colour later on. And then I move out of C-655 Kaveri Vihar.

Apart from Patricks, there is no one else, so we put some gulaal on each other and moved to the row behind. This row has been amazing for my childhood, where I have played everything from Racetrip when electricity goes, to pitthul, kabbadi and obviously cricket. So we played holi here with everyone with our entire arsenal. All my grenades were transferred to a terrace and fired from there.

Although as always there are two types of people everywhere, Good and Bad. We were obviously the good lot, and the bad ones use on Holi day are the ones who use Silver Paint, Grease, and play with even Gobar at times. Also they whistle and say bad stuff when didi log from our township go around on holi. All dirty people…

After the first round we reload our arsenal and move towards Nucleus club where the whole of township assembles. Everything is arranged, from drums full of colour, pipes throwing up chilled water and water tankers supplying hell lot of it, holi style dhinchak music, jalebis and bhaijyas, my friends from all over the township, thandai (2 types, one for us, one for uncles with something called bhang in it which is like alcohol I heard). It ends with food packets.
After playing for a long time, its back home and then the efforts to wash off the colours, and its bad if someone has put some paint or grease on you, bad people. Next day in school everyone would turn with pink cheeks and multicoloured hands. Holi also brings a lot of tiredness and a nice sleep on that day.

Also the sad part is like Navratri it always either falls on sideline or in between an exam. Horrible timing for such an awesome festival, but I will always enjoy celebrating it.

Never better than at Korba…

This year I didn’t celebrate it after quite sometime, hoping this never happens again and keep on enjoying my favorite festival.

Hope you have read the Navratri collection,

1 comment:

thequark said...

Another great thing about Holi is even if people are colored differently during celebration they turn up in different hues of the same pink/reddish color after cleaning up. So you got the moral of the story :P