LifeZamaZing

YEAH, it’s holi time and you can already feel it in the air.

Suddenly there are advertisements about skin care lotions and safe herbal colors/gulal and hair oil and people in rin-ki-safedi-white clothes and then there are colors splashing all over them.

God! now it is the commercials that remind you of the festival’s coming than anything else. Well, but this year we had some different reminder as well. You see, holi is really famous in Rajasthan and it is as good as diwali for them. And since holi is coming we had a few unsolicited Rajasthani guests on Sunday morning. They came up early morning (well, it was 10 am but on a sunday that is early to me!) and started singing aloud with manjiras and a dhol-like instrument (which i am going to call dhol now onwards;))

It was a couple with their teenage daughter and one more companion. The daughter was so trained that she started dancing as soon as the dhol started playing. It was in perfect synchrony. And there was an odd indifference about the way she did it. She really did not care to feel the fact that she was in an alien place with people’s eyes zooming in on her. She had only one sense of knowledge- like Arjun’s vision of the bird’s eye- and that was the taal of the dhol. If the dhol plays she dances around in a typical fashion, if it stops she stops abruptly as if she weren’t dancing at all. And her dedicated indifference was most highlighted when i started taking pictures of her. Others in the troupe cared to look at me, she did not even grant me that pleasure.

But anyways, we were talking holi. And yes that is what they had come for- collecting money in the name of holi. You could call them beggars, nuisance, pain, alien or anything else but the fact is that i liked to be reminded of holi by them rather than the shampoo ads. Somehow they gave holi the touch it deserved! A touch of colors, a touch of LOUD and unclear music, a touch of incomprehensible lyrics, a touch of mitti, a touch of des and desipan, a touch of indianness!

Yes, indianness is what they brought about. Something that the fancy hair oil ads missed out.

[P.S.- Please excuse the pathetic lighting in the photos. I clicked them with a mobile phone and could not manage better lighting. These are the best out of 7-10 pics i clicked, so just make do with them ;)]

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