Holi Power in Pushkar!

Nice cakes n tingz
Nice cakes in Pushkar. Don’t know of any other place where you can just walk up to a street vendor and ask for a special cake. So we spent most of the time walking round shops eating special cake. Breakfast chillum with Om Baba, the guy who takes care of the guest house I stayed in, also sets you up for the day. Me and Suzanna, part of the Portuguese and Italian gang I was with, shared a room at the Sai Baba Guesthouse. We paid 50 rupees each for the room. It felt like the Princess Suite and we were indeed treated that way too by the amazing Om Baba. Can’t really place an age on Om Baba, but he’s at a cool mature age, about late thirties, early forties at a push. He used to go out with a Spanish girl for four years so speaks pretty decent Spanish. He walks on his hands and has this incredible energy, always positive, always laughing. He has this amazing huge smile. In fact he looks like an African with his long dreadlocks, dark skin and broad, distinctive features. We didn’t ask him how he lost his legs, it didn’t feel relevant. On the first night, he invited me and Suzanna into his room to show us some of his crazy photos and we smoked chillum after chillum. Man that man can smoke! Next morning he was hammering on our door to get us out of bed for the Holi party that was about to start in the square down the road. He had chai ready for us and some plastic bottles of water mixed with coloured dyes.

Full power!
Holi in Pushkar was full power! I can still play the whole scene back in slow-motion: the contagious energy that possessed you the second you entered the mayhem, clouds of coloured dyes exploding in the air and plastering everyone in a thick chalky substance; people smearing each other in pink, purple, orange, green yellow, blue; shirts being ripped off and flung hedonistic style across the colour-stained ground... The faces of rainbow warriors obscured with colour, disclosing wide toothy grins and eyes that danced with mischief and childish malice. People chasing each other, slipping, falling, laughing, dancing, jumping and raving to the soundsystem that played psy-trance and Bollywood tracks back to back - it was a high-voltage sun-drenched electric rainbow.

Too tempting...
Watching for about five minutes from the roof top of the Om Baba Restaurant was enough to send me hurtling down the stairs to join in with the madness. It took about 20 seconds to be smothered in colour. The only downside is that as a woman, you do need to watch yourself because they will try and get there hands wherever they can. I tried to punch one guy but I missed and slipped on the mud instead. It was very frustrating, and as much as I hate to admit it, I was lucky to have a male friend take care of the situation. The other down side is that the dye they use is not natural so it sticks to you for days. In other parts of India, they use vegetable and herbal dyes or even flowers, but I think this one was a mad raver lunatic party, so I guess anything really did go...

No other place celebrates Holi quite like Pushkar
You know how it always rains in Glastonbury and how you get the usual lunatic suspects that dance like they're in a wet tee-shirt competition? Well imagine that rain had been mixed with huge tubs of paint... It's been like this all across India, but as confirmed by a number of people who had experienced this spell-binding time of year in various parts of the sub-continent, there really is no other place that celebrates the festival of colour quite like Pushkar. It looked like every soul in the middle of the square had been possessed by some kind of luminous vision, hands flaying all over the place as sexy psytrance met the hip-shaking extravaganza of Bollywood beats. Full power baby! I’ve never seen or felt or experienced anything like it. Everyone on a cloud, levels of serotonin goin’ thru the roof, total hedonism meets cultural tradition and gets away with it - this is one experience that I won’t ever forget… Happy Holi Hugz to all my beautiful friends!