Thanks to our school’s wonderful new prefects and head boy Daly College had a 5 day long Holi break. A brief note about prefects: Prefects are 12th grade students that have been selected to serve as a bridge between the student body population, teachers, and administrators. There are a select number of prefects within the 12th class and each prefect serves a different interest giving them roles such as the “cultural prefect”, the “academic prefect”, the “sports prefect”, and the international exchange or “Round Square prefect” (Muskan my amazing host sister was selected as the RS prefect and we are all very proud of her). Then there are two prefects elected to serve as head boy and head girl of all of these prefects and student body of Daly College. My friend Arjun Singh is the head boy and a girl from a day boarding house is the head girl, but I just consider my best friend, Tanya Singh, who is in boarding with me to be the head girl. That wasn’t very brief I know, but it’s something very different from what I experienced in my high school so some explanation was necessary.
Holi is a festival in Desi culture to celebrate the coming of spring and the victory or good over evil. I really like to compare it to San Antonio’s own colorful festival of Fiesta. This is a festival, maybe like Christmas in the US, that everyone celebrates regardless of religion. Everyone gets together to throw powered color, gulaab, on each other and squirt each other with water guns. On this day people also drink bhangh, hard liquor mixed with milk, and burn holikas (giant wood and cow poop pyramids).
My first Holi was definitely memorable and very Indian. I left campus after school with a group of my girl boarding friends, the names you need to remember here are Pihu and Anushka Rai (who goes by Rai to avoid confusion with other Anushkas), and went straight to a new cafe that had been receiving quite a lot of praise from Daly College’s day boarding students. After finding our cafe and meeting up with 15 other boarding students who had also just left Daly College for their Holi break we discovered our fatal mistake in choosing to eat at this new cafe. It was an all veg cafe, so basically the equivalent to mushy garbage for a bunch of non-veg boarding students fresh out of a boarding school with awful food. We weighed the pros and cons of ditching for a Dominoes but the small veg minority in our group and hunger won over, so we stayed. After our very sad veg meal our school group split up to start their Holi breaks by traveling home to their respective cities by train, flight, and car.
I spent the night with Pihu, one of the girls in my boarding school friend group, and enjoyed spending time with a family very similar to my American family. There was a lot of teasing in a way that was almost identical to the relationship I share with my parents and a lot of great food. Although on actual Holi day we didn’t want to be stuck with Pihu’s parent’s lunch party so we drove to Sehore, a village right outside of Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh, to stay with Rai.
While we were in Sehore we did everything one could possibly do in Anushka’s village. We went to the waterpark, hotel, and movie theater her family owns and made the most of our short vacation. We were fortunate enough to have the waterpark to ourselves for a while and let me tell you, it’s not that different from an American water park. Sure the slides are a little smaller but the general idea is the same, minus the minimal clothing part in America. Most guys were shirtless and all the girls were wearing very conservative one pieces or just wearing their clothes, we opted for the second choice. I would recommend that America does add a rain dance section to their Slitterbauns though. The most fun we had was dancing in front of mega speakers to Bollywood music in the rain room. After a going around Rai’s hotel, eating an overload of chicken, trying not to get in a accident when Pihu drove the hotel’s golf cart around the premises, making cookies without measuring cups and with Indian substitute ingredients, and watching Bollywood movies we celebrated Holi!
Holi is a festival in Desi culture to celebrate the coming of spring and the victory or good over evil. I really like to compare it to San Antonio’s own colorful festival of Fiesta. This is a festival, maybe like Christmas in the US, that everyone celebrates regardless of religion. Everyone gets together to throw powered color, gulaab, on each other and squirt each other with water guns. On this day people also drink bhangh, hard liquor mixed with milk, and burn holikas (giant wood and cow poop pyramids).
My first Holi was definitely memorable and very Indian. I left campus after school with a group of my girl boarding friends, the names you need to remember here are Pihu and Anushka Rai (who goes by Rai to avoid confusion with other Anushkas), and went straight to a new cafe that had been receiving quite a lot of praise from Daly College’s day boarding students. After finding our cafe and meeting up with 15 other boarding students who had also just left Daly College for their Holi break we discovered our fatal mistake in choosing to eat at this new cafe. It was an all veg cafe, so basically the equivalent to mushy garbage for a bunch of non-veg boarding students fresh out of a boarding school with awful food. We weighed the pros and cons of ditching for a Dominoes but the small veg minority in our group and hunger won over, so we stayed. After our very sad veg meal our school group split up to start their Holi breaks by traveling home to their respective cities by train, flight, and car.
I spent the night with Pihu, one of the girls in my boarding school friend group, and enjoyed spending time with a family very similar to my American family. There was a lot of teasing in a way that was almost identical to the relationship I share with my parents and a lot of great food. Although on actual Holi day we didn’t want to be stuck with Pihu’s parent’s lunch party so we drove to Sehore, a village right outside of Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh, to stay with Rai.
While we were in Sehore we did everything one could possibly do in Anushka’s village. We went to the waterpark, hotel, and movie theater her family owns and made the most of our short vacation. We were fortunate enough to have the waterpark to ourselves for a while and let me tell you, it’s not that different from an American water park. Sure the slides are a little smaller but the general idea is the same, minus the minimal clothing part in America. Most guys were shirtless and all the girls were wearing very conservative one pieces or just wearing their clothes, we opted for the second choice. I would recommend that America does add a rain dance section to their Slitterbauns though. The most fun we had was dancing in front of mega speakers to Bollywood music in the rain room. After a going around Rai’s hotel, eating an overload of chicken, trying not to get in a accident when Pihu drove the hotel’s golf cart around the premises, making cookies without measuring cups and with Indian substitute ingredients, and watching Bollywood movies we celebrated Holi!
On actual Holi day Pihu and I were in the car driving to Rai’s house, but luckily people kind of blur the official dates of Holi and play in the week surrounding Holi to keep the party going. We adhered to this protocol and played a few days after Holi after spending the day in Bhopal. Rai, her family, Pihu and I drove to Bhopal which is about an hour away from her village - side note the term village is thrown around loosely here. A village can range from whatever image pops into your mind of rural India and farmers to a suburban area outside of city limits. For context in the Texas we could consider Bulverde a village in relation to San Antonio. - and spent the day seeing Bhopal. We overate at a swanky hotel and went to the lake which Bhopal is known for and rode around on a speed boat (Rai briefly drove which made Pihu a little uneasy as can seen below).
When we arrived back at Rai’s house we grabbed the gulaab out of her temple, filled up our one water fun, and changed into clothes we didn’t care about. There really is nothing very ceremonial about playing Holi you just go with you gut, so we simply started by rubbing it all over each others’ faces. Of course it’s more of a game than anything so there was lots of running, screaming, “I’m blind”, and spitting rainbow colors after recovering from the latest gulaab attack.
All in all my break for Holi was reall special and probably one of the more fun breaks I have had. I finally found a great group of friends in the boarding house that I am roam around with in and out of school. And let me tell you, you don’t realize how much you need a group of girls until yours is very, very far away.