Happy Holi!
While Wales is celebrating St David’s Day today on the 1st March, India is also celebrating a festival called Holi. A delegation from Wales has come to Delhi this week as part of a week long programme to explore higher education links between the two countries, and some of us from the group took the opportunity to see this festival and spread some of the Welsh ‘Hwyl’ to our friends in India.
As soon as we got close to the festival area we could hear people singing and playing drums around the site. We turned a corner and someone smeared red paint across our cheeks and wished us ‘Happy Holi’. We placed paint on their face in turn and wished the same, and then everyone began to join in! After a few minutes we had red, green, orange, yellow and pink paint all over us and felt like we were truly part of the festival.
Men sitting with different shaped drums played continuously while people sang, clapped and danced along. Children of all ages were running in and out of the houses and between the trees trying to splash everyone with coloured water and then hiding in case they were splashed back. It was wonderful to see everyone enjoying themselves no matter what their age.
To join in the fun we had taken some Welsh dragon stencils and red paint to put on ourselves in honour of St David’s Day. Once those around us had seen them, we had lots of questions about the dragon and whether we used paint in our festivities for St David’s Day! See some of the short video clips on
youtube to see our dragon stencils and holi paint on some of the people at the festival.