Holi Happenings!

Today was Holi! It was a pretty mild Holi for us... it was pretty calm in our neighborhood this year. The Capital is a lot calmer than M-town, and our neighborhood is pretty calm too. (If you want to look at past Holi blogs, click here!)

Holi is a very unique holiday. It's a holiday where both kids and adults alike smear colored powder on each other, pour buckets of dye on each other and throw water balloons. You can cover a complete stranger in dye and they can't get mad. It's pretty unique. Here's a pic below of a guy selling Holi supplies:

Another thing that makes this holiday unique is it's one of two holidays here in our part of South Asia, where a majority of people that celebrate, consume Bhang. Bhang is the large green leaves and flowering shoots of mostly the male cannabis plant... yeah, marijuana. It is most commonly served as a cold drink made with yogurt. They also batter and fry it as well as put it as a little ball in the middle of sweets. There have been articles in the paper all week talking about the benefits of Bhang. It's been pretty funny. Yesterday's paper said:

"Bhang & Holi become synonymous because this intoxicant is a great agent for decompression; it escalates the spirit of Holi, liberates the human personality as exemplified by Shiva to the point that the man becomes the festival and the festival, the man."

It also said:

"Bhang heightens the powers of such perception, but only if taken in right measure. in Hinduism, intoxication in therapeutic doses is permitted for meditation; that's why it's such a great way of life"

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Just in case you were wondering...I'm not at all recommending it and no, we didn't have any Bhang - but I did think what the newspaper said was funny.
Here's Aashini as she's getting ready for the festivities:

Here's Adam & our neighbor Tusshar before they got dirty :)

This is when they first got started :)

Here's some of our other neighbors having fun:

This picture made me laugh :)

These people were biking down our street and were looking all around for people throwing things at them.

Here's a picture of Adam towards the end of playing... it wasn't very wild on our street this year, so he isn't too messy.

I didn't get any pictures of myself, but here are some of Aashini. She didn't like being dirty, so she was a little unhappy.

I didn't get a very good picture before she ran inside to get cleaned up... but this one is kinda fun :)

I hope everyone had a happy Holi!