Today is Holi, one of India's rowdiest, most colorful festivals. The streets are filled with people throwing color at each other, and everybody is fair game. You see men on scooters with blotches of red and green on their office shirts, or people catching buses with their faces covered in pink. Even the police are tolerant of the craziness, and turn a blind eye to the drunk kids riding in crammed vans, toting spray guns filled with colored water. Some call Holi the last of the Pagan holidays. Jeet Singh (photographed above) says it's a time for people to put aside their enmities and embrace each other with joy and fun. It's also a day when everyone gets very very drunk on "Bhang", a drink made from pot juice...
...Like these guys who danced the whole day on the roof outside my verandah to Madonna, the Back Street Boys, and Indian Film songs.
In our house, we celebrated with this delicious sweet rice called "Zarda", a special dish that Nani makes on rare occasions. She makes it with (I'm not joking) a rice that is 30-years-old. My uncle bought tons of it years and years ago from a special farm and Nani has stashed it away all this while. If you think that's strange, one of my work colleagues told me that his family still has a jar of a 14-year-old lemon pickle that his grandmother made just before she passed away.
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