Holi Cannonballs in Colour Coming on March 27th
THE HINDU
For those interested in a traditional touch while playing colours during the Holi, Jaipur’s famous gulal gotas could be the answer. A people’s festival, celebrating societal “liminality”, that has a dash of everything — vivid colours, loud music, social sanction for psychotropic drugs, public display of the society’s collective eroticism; and all this on a much grander scale than any “woodstock festival” ever held anywhere in the world. [link]
Yes, Holi is around the corner; and like every year, the market has geared up to outdo itself — throwing at consumers all sorts of colour-toys, water pistols, pichkaris and what have you. But for those who have had enough of the pink and yellow plastics, thankfully our country continues to preserve the charm and crackle of the old world — in small discreet parts of the urban bazaar, the discreet cameos of these traditional arts often come to the rescue of the discerning. One such piece of traditional art is the gulaal gota — a beautifully decorated, flattened ball of lac, filled with soft gulaal in different colours. This was how people threw colour at each other before the synthetic rubber water balloons took over. And Jaipur in the only place in the whole world where these little beauties are made, claim their makers.
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| Gulal gotas: An art in itself. Photos: Rohit Jain Paras |
Yes, Holi is around the corner; and like every year, the market has geared up to outdo itself — throwing at consumers all sorts of colour-toys, water pistols, pichkaris and what have you. But for those who have had enough of the pink and yellow plastics, thankfully our country continues to preserve the charm and crackle of the old world — in small discreet parts of the urban bazaar, the discreet cameos of these traditional arts often come to the rescue of the discerning. One such piece of traditional art is the gulaal gota — a beautifully decorated, flattened ball of lac, filled with soft gulaal in different colours. This was how people threw colour at each other before the synthetic rubber water balloons took over. And Jaipur in the only place in the whole world where these little beauties are made, claim their makers.
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