PURIM SPECIAL: A NEPALESE BATTLE OF COLORS
These are no Charlie’s Angles. They mean business. Equipped for combat, everyone for them is fair game…
…including me.
The whole village – a tiny hamlet nestled inside a distant Nepalese gorge – is full of action. The weapon of choice – bright colored powder!
As one group chases the other over a hanging rope bridge, another noisy skirmish rises at a narrow alley just around the corner. We try to hide from the action but to no avail.
You don’t get to choose the mask you’re wearing
Forget the American Halloween, the Catholic Carnival or Jewish Purim. This masquerade is in a league of its own because here you don’t get to choose the mask.
Someone else gets to choose it for you!
Welcome to Holi – the Hindu ancient spring festival. It starts every year on Purnima – the night of the full moon just before the Spring Equinox and signifies the end of winter. It is also known as the “Carnival of Colors”, and the reason is – well – self-explanatory. Holi is essentially free-for-all Indian version of Paintball where participants play, chase and color each other with powder, colored water guns and other innovative instruments of war.
Anyone and everyone are fair game – friends, strangers even foreign tourists on off-road motorbikes. We learned the last one the hard way.
Stopping is not an option
In Holi no one gets spared. And I mean no one.
The folks on the rural roads of Nepal don’t overlook moving targets. Damn! They can hit your face while you ride through their village. One of them even managed to score a direct hit right through my open helmet visor. Now, try to zoom through Main Street with a hunk of red curry splashed all over your face and obscuring your sight. I couldn’t see a thing and yet somehow, at that point, I knew stopping was not really an option.
The Jewish connection
The reality is that once you stop trying to avoid the splash and instead give yourself in, Holi is actually fun. Nobody really wants to harm anyone and, truth being said, there is no curry powder a warm shower can’t wash. The whole thing is very colorful and also kind of childish – in a very good way.
It also feels strangely familiar. Holi and Purim don’t just happen to resemble each other. The both happen around the same dates. They both break the daily routine to do something quite wild and juvenile. Heck, even the name is similar.
Do Purnima and Purim sound that different??