Holi Technicolor Batman!

Sunday was Holi, the festival of color, a holiday of ambiguous origination, a bit like a Hindu version of Easter. There are elements of a spring festival in the picture, and then there are some dubious religious stories pasted on top. The TIFR colony's version of the holiday begins the night of the full moon with a brief bonfire and passing out of sweets. A brief trip to Gokul for dinner and we missed all but a few embers surrounded by a lot of empty chairs, and someone using another fire to burn some leaves and make a lot of smoke.

The festivities began the next morning at around 10am with a few people milling around near the cricket pitch, smearing powdered color on anyone within reach. I wandered out and soon found myself tinted. There wasn't much to the coloring ritual beyond a "Happy Holi" and a smear on the face. After a little while, a hose was passed up to a first story window and a mud puddle was constructed. People gave up color for brown with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Sreekar made a good show of resisting, but he too joined with the mud people. I lingered until I had to fend some of the revellers off lest they pick me up and carry me into the mud. Instead, I went and took my bike out for a spin around town.



I started with my usual route out to Marine Drive and up to Malabar Hill. On the way past the slum near Cuffe Parade a bucket of lavender colored water was thrown on me, and riding through the city as it evaporated off my shirt was quite pleasant. I figured I'd check out Banganga tank while I was on Malabar Hill, and found the standard cricket game going on, except that everyone was painted purple. A couple of times I stopped and let someone give my face a bit more paint.

Here's the view from my handlebars:



From Malabar Hill I cut east and North across the city and then turned left and headed north, perhaps as far as Dadar, I'm not sure. Traffic was really light, even for Sunday. Occasional groups of people milled about in chai shops, restaurants and doorways with varying ammounts of paint. A few of the sidewalk dwellers were taking baths as I rode by. It was nice to almost blend in for a change. Being painted purple partially hid the fact that I was ferengi. On the other hand, I was clearly one of the only ones exerting myself on this afternoon. It seems that in Mumbai, everyone takes the afternoon of Holi even easier than a normal Sunday, which is dead slow by Bombay standards. What that is by rest of the world standards I may have forgotten. Eventually, I decided that I'd had enough and turned around. It took a while to get the paint off my face, and the shirt is not going to be white again. That's okay.

In other news, this is an interesting article about the place of the slums in Mumbai. Specifiically, it talks about how all of the recycling that is going on as under the radar business.

And not related to Mumbai at all is this article on one of the more interesting biofuels on the horizon. It is lots better than ethanol.