Holi Wars

I’ve turned into one of those people who hate Holi. with good reasons.

i believe it marks the beginning of summer. Mumbai summers are a pain i can do without. its an absolutely disgusting feeling when you get to office after an hour in the bus, completely dehydrated, with damp pants coz of all the butt sweat.

the pollution makes it worse. absolutely hate having to walk on a centimeter-thick layer of plastic from all the damn balloons people throw around nowadays. and the gulal, disgusting stuff that absolutely refuses to get off your skin unless you wash yourself sixteen times with soap. of course, the oily variety doesn’t go at all unless you scrape off/shed your epithelium.

the men make it worser. i can understand why women absolutely hate holi. had a hairy incident on the bike on holi day. poor ole wobbly Charl had quite some dodging and swearing to do sitting on the back of me bike as we tried, rather recklessly, to speed away from a rickshaw full of rowdies who’d taken it upon themselves to introduce our faces to some gulal. which, when your doing 40 on a bike is petrifying.

wasn’t always this way though. until the age of 10 or so, i was one of those crazy kids who had mastered the intricacies of projectile motion without having the damndest clue about what it was.

we had a little “tradition” in our building. actually, it was more like a war, with the neighboring building. there wasn’t an objective of any sort, none that i can remember at least. everyone was pretty much tryin’ to get the other guys wet. it wouldn’t be a typical guy thing unless there was some kind of almost military feel to the stuff we were up to.

on the ground, we’d have the… uh… ground troops. fellows armed with a bizarre variety of water pistols and several buckets of water. with color in them. the real fun tho was on the terrace. we were the artillery section, if one may call it that. we were armed with the balloons. dozens, if not a few hundreds. throwin’ shit like there’s no tomorrow, hitting anything and everything that moved. pure murderous intent behind every balloon aimed at an opposition guy down on the street, or a balloon guy on their terrace.

the utterly absurd part was when there was this occasional unspoken truce. for some reason, we felt it necessary when throwing balloons to scream, yell, shriek… basically any sound last associated with primitive man… and then there’d be a moment when both sides would fall silent, briefly, transfixed by the sight of a far more appealing target on the streets below. hostilities forgotten, and all our neanderthal actions would be directed at a common target.

women. the most fun things with whom to make intimate contact with some rubber. am talking about the damn balloons.

the cheap thrills we’d derive from making them scamper around, dodging raining projectiles. the cheers that would go up from both sides on scoring a direct hit. it was almost worth not growing out of…