It’s been far too long since I last posted and I apologize, my excuse is that I’m busy having the time of my life :) I realized that I never posted about Holi! It was one of the top things I was looking forward to coming to India during this time. I got a little nervous when I heard that the festival wasn’t really celebrated down south as much (where I am) and then even more nervous when I heard that we had a field visit and a test scheduled on that day. Luckily we found a way to celebrate on campus with a bunch of the public health students that we have class with. We met up with them after they had already started but all day people were flinging pure pigment and died water all over the KMC greens (like a quad or courtyard-type thing) making us look like a bunch of multicolored avatars.
So for those who don’t know, Holi is a Hindu festival celebrated every March, mostly in Northern India. This year it fell on March 8th and I’ve heard that it has become a big tourist attraction in northern towns and the festivals last all day non-stop. It is also called the festival of colors and through the pictures you can see why! Originally and historically, Holi marks the end of "winter" and the beginnig of spring. It is supposed to commemorate the good harvest, the beautiful spring colors and many different religious myths and legends. For us and many of the students with us, the major premise was to throw pure color and pigment at eachother until you are covered and literally spitting greens and purples. They also like to get you with a few buckets of water and dye so we made sure to not wear any clothes that we were particularly fond of. One of our friends who has blond hair normally, still has a full head of pink hair from the dye, and the paint took a good two weeks to fully leave my finger and toenails! But it was totally worth it and I even bought a set of colors to bring back to the US this past weekend! I’m really glad that Manipal has such a diverse group of student and that this festival was brought here with them so that I got to experience it!
Oh and by the way it is now March 28th and the Holi color is still on the streets and sidewalks. It’s proof that we haven’t seen a single drop of precipitation since we’ve been here!
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