Holi Lent

The Bacchalian festival of Holi has just rolled over us.

All ancient civilisations of note have their one festival of revelry and ribaldry. India is no exception. So why do we have to get ants in our pants if some mama's boys  get boisterous, drive drunk, eat meat,  feel up the aunty next door, wallow in the mud and display porcine tendencies for 24 hours?

Blame it on the West. The Renassiance followed by Victorian Prudery. I believe when the Brits landed in India, they started queering the pitch, in a manner of speaking. You soon had a whole lot of Natives trying to be more White than the Sahibs themselves, and that I suppose is where the social schizophrenia began to set in. Now you have the educated North Indian bunch  trying to sanitize Holi, and weave in all kinds of contexts and meanings to suit their particular brand of  pseudo-secular prudery.

The much maligned Bhojpuri songs on the occassion, with their double and double-chinned entrende are more honest by far than the banal Bollywood music that smacks of hypocrisy. Holi is the time to go absolutely mad, to let your hair down for one single day - get tipsy, do a bit of pot, indulge in sanctioned horseplay. So what if the village lads run out of mud and take to a bit of shit-slinging! It's no big deal, one gets to witness that  everyday on Indian news channels. Jai Ho!

Yes, it's easy for me to sit on my chair and pontificate, but I do suspect there's a foreign hand in the origins of Holi . Not Italian, Greek!

Holi is something that may have come in with Alexander the Great .. a feast in honour of Bachhus, the Lord of the Good Times. (And I'm not talking about Vijay Mal-wallah). And that's when the Ma-ka-ladla went the wayward way .. he tippled,and toddled  and toppled, right down the ladder of evolution.. if only for a day. Many a guy lives it up the one day, and lives it down the rest of the year, specially if  he wakes up out of a Holi hangover to find there's an 'eve teasing' charge slapped on him by the (female) human hippo who lives next door! Holi Smoke!

Holi invariably falls during the season of Lent, when pious Catholics try their best to become Puritan. At least the Latinos struck the right balance. First go absolutely berserk in three days of Carnival that lasts from Sunday to Shrove Tuesday... and then repent in dust and ashes from Ash Wednesday onwards.

And then we'll wait for the Bunny forty days later... Not the Playboy Bunny, silly... the Easter one!