Dussehra

I know I've misspelled that but Monday Oct 2 was the tri-fecta. Durga Pooja (a big bengali festival celebrating the goddess Durga), Ghandi's birthday and Dussehra. Ok, Durga Pooja and Dussehra are always on the same day but it's not usually Ghandi's b-day. Last time I was in a Bengali neighborhood so Durga Pooja was a big deal. This year however, I live in a muslim neighborhood so Durga isn't such a big thing. A few friends and I went to see the Dusharra festival instead.

Every park in Delhi has something going on but we decided to go to the big one. So there's an area about half a football field cordoned off. In the middle are a bunch of things to set off fireworks. And on one end three enormous (like the height of a 7 story building) paper maiche "men" with faces painted in flourescent colors. I found out later that these men are in fact the Ravana (super devil) and his devil brother and devil son. So this guy on a loud speaker talks for about 2 hours (especially boring when you don't understand the language). I've been told it's just about thanking the people who paid for the festivities. And fireworks are going off, which instead of being pretty is quite scarey because they don't go very high and you're standing like 15 feet away from the launch pad so you're just ensuring that you don't get hit.

Then the action begins. First they have these 8 feet tall things that look like kitchy wind mills (y'know the kind people keep in their yards that spin all around) and they light them on fire so fire is spinning and shooting everywhere. Inevitably some fire ball is thrown from the spinny thing about 30 yards, hopefully within the "safe zone", but maybe not, and the crowd cheers with delight at the risk of certain death.

Then, after endless waiting and anticipation, they fire flaming arrows into the statues which explode. Literally these huge statues are reduced to nothing in a matter of 3 seconds each. And the flames are so big that the indian start running away. People are so non-chalant here that when they start running you know you're in trouble. And then it's over.

I wasn't planning on going to this, and went straight from an ultimate game, so didn't have a camera but for a picture of some other park's statues, I found these. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/Culture/Festivals/Dusseh.html but their statues were dinky compared to the ones I saw.