My Year of Living Draftily

Happy New Year in Hampi

Okay, I'm way behind in getting my photos processed on the computer, and even moreso to get them uploaded on the blog. So clinging desperately to the "better late than never" theory, I offer for you here some photos of how New Year's is celebrated in much of small town India - rangoli art!

I was still in my 'homebase' of Hampi at New Year's, having got here for Christmas a week earlier. Was so lovely to be back in south India!

At around 8pm on New Years Eve the women started gathering in front of their homes in the small village, and setting out grids of tiny dots with rice flour poured from clenched fists. This was to be their pattern grid. The street had been painted earlier in the day with what looked, to some other tourists and I, to be a mixture of cow dung and water. We checked with a local, and yes, that's exactly what it was. It apparently provides a more uniform and opaque background against which the colours of the rangolis show up better.

Using the dots and generally a pattern sketched out on paper, the women and girls drew beautiful, complex designs and then filled them in with colourful sands. By 10pm the street was a veritable art gallery, with various barriers like bikes erected to try to keep the cows away from trampling them at least for a few hours. Most were getting blurred by foot and hoof traffic by morning. Like some of life's best art, so ephemeral and you have to make the most of the moment you come across it!

I've put together a small album of the best of the ones I came across - enjoy!

Pushkar Camel Festival: Workin' it

     
[November 4-8] I was this close to skipping the Pushkar Camel festival, or mela, the "world's largest" (and yes, I've since discovered that there are others in India and elsewhere). An otherwise tranquil, small pilgrimage town is mobbed by tens of - there are some claims of hundreds of - thousands of pilgrims, foreign tourists, tribal people and as many livestock. Prices for everything skyrocket, narrow streets are jammed, and best advantage must be taken to make a killing or snap the trip-making photo in these frenzied eight days. Yet my guidebook acknowledges all this and still says that if you're in Rajasthan in November the Pushkar Camel Mela remains a 'do not miss' event.

Slave to the must-do list that I am, I went. And I liked it, despite all of the above which was all true. But I went early as most of the camel trading takes place in the first few days and many herders leave once business is done.

The last four days is when the pilgrims really arrive en masse. Hindus believe that bathing in Pushkar's sacred lake, or sagar, on the five days leading up to and including the full moon of the month of Kartika (usually November) will absolve them of all sins and release them from the bonds of endless re-birth. It's quite the prize, so thousands flock to take part in the group bath. But I've seen many pilgrimage sites, and whacks of pilgrims, so I left just as the town's seams were beginning to strain (and well before the real onslaught hit, apparently!). I was here for the camels!

And they didn't let me down. Camel, cattle and horse traders from all over western India gathered and groomed and strutted to put their best hooves forward.

Exciting times in Kamalapura!

I seem to have certain powers here.  I can part groups of young men before me like the Red Sea. I leave joy - or at least mirth - in my wake with a simple smile and incantation of my name on command. I don't have these powers at home. One could choose to view these attentions and others - like the offer of a rickshaw every 1-3 minutes - as one of the inherent hassles of traveling in India. But I've chosen to view them as a superpower. It's been bestowed upon me on this side of the planet solely due to the colour of my skin, and to a certain extent my gender and other accidents of birth, nothing meritorious about it at all. For that reason it's incumbent upon me to to wield this power with grace and goodwill, or at least give it my best shot.

I spent much of April 2nd in Kamalapura, about 6km from Hampi, the rural village home of the family who runs my guesthouse. The occasion was Kali Murtha, the aforementioned 'festival of meat' where 200 or so goats are sacrificed to cleanse the sins of the villagers by committing the even greater sin of killing all those goats. At least that's how it was explained to me, I'm sure I'm missing a key element somewhere.

Holy Holi, Batman!

There's no point in blogging about Holi without a lot of photos - it's the festival of colours, and my writing alone just can't convey the madly fun chaos that is Holi. Check out my (first!) photo album, Holi in Hampi, for more.

Update: I've added a few more photos from another traveler at my guesthouse, so if you'd already gone through it earlier check it out again.