Revellers dance on the street during Holi festival celebrations in Allahabad yesterday.
AFP/New Delhi
From soldiers in the north to teenagers in the south, Indians of all hues threw water-filled balloons and smeared coloured powder on each other yesterday to celebrate the spring festival of Holi.
The revelry began in the early hours with children engaging in water fights, using plastic guns and balloons to splash each other and any unsuspecting person in sight from the rooftops of homes in the capital Delhi.
Soldiers in the disputed state of Kashmir as well along the Wagah border between India and Pakistan rubbed brightly-coloured powder on each other’s faces and danced to Bollywood songs heralding the “festival of colours”.
In Mumbai, home to the Hindi film industry, usually riotous celebrations appeared to have been muted, perhaps in response to a call by leading actors to conserve water as millions of Indians face their worst drought in decades.
Although the festival is usually celebrated with wild “rain dances” and the throwing of buckets of water, the drought in central parts of Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is the capital, led many to push for a “dry” Holi.
The call for austerity did not reach Delhi, where one jewellery store offered a gold water pistol on sale for the princely sum of Rs.8mn ($147,000), according to a report in the Hindustan Times newspaper.
The store, P P Jewellers also sells silver water pistols for Rs.50,000 ($920) which “are a hot-selling gift item this Holi”, shop owner Rahul Gupta told the newspaper.
Holi, a public holiday, marks the arrival of spring and is especially popular in northern India and other parts of the world with large Hindu communities.
IANS adds: The festival of colours Holi was celebrated across India with enthusiasm and bonhomie though three people lost their lives in Andhra Pradesh.
In the national capital, revellers were soaked in a riot of colours as they smeared ‘gulal’ (coloured powder) on each other, distributed sweets and danced to loud music.
While youngsters armed with ‘pichkaris’ (water guns) and balloons filled with coloured water sprayed each other as well as passers-by, elders preferred to smear one another with gulal as they hugged each other and wished ‘Holi Mubarak’.
“My brother and me were up till late last night and filled over 100 balloons with coloured water. Since morning, we have been targeting people with them,” said 15-year-old Astha Sharma from Patel Nagar in west Delhi.
Bands of youngsters drenched in blue, green, pink, red and yellow could be seen roaming Delhi streets with colours, balloons and pichkaris as they searched for unwary people.
Many visited temples and prayed to Hindu deity Krishna.
In southern state Andhra Pradesh, Holi was celebrated with traditional fanfare and gaiety. Governor E.S.L. Narasimhan and Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy led the celebrations.
However, the festivities were marred with the death of three people in separate incidents across Andhra Pradesh.
A youth drowned in a well in in Hyderabad, while a six-year-old boy drowned in a water tank in Nalgonda district. Another youth, playing Holi, was killed after a truck knocked him down in Guntur district.
In West Bengal capital Kolkata, ‘Dol Yatra’ as Holi is called there, was celebrated with traditional fervour with songs, dances and prayers.
Thousands including overseas Indians assembled at Santiniketan, about 165 km from the state capital, where Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore re-introduced Holi as ‘Vasanta Utsav’ (Spring fest) in his Visva-Bharati university.
In Bihar, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar played Holi with Janata Dal-United workers and the public and took pot-shots at Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Lalu Prasad.