Raghav Daga Week 13: Remembering The Colors

 It was a Saturday morning, and I stood on my balcony on the fifth floor as the warm wind blew into my face. I peered over the tall railing, sloshing my water to the gun to ensure it’s ready to go. As soon as I noticed a person walking past, my soft, high-pitched voice yelled, “Bura na mano, Holi hai!” as they got drenched with a stream of water landing directly on the top of their head. That expression translated to “don’t take offense, it’s Holi,” also known as the festival of colors in India. Often around the beginning of summer, which is around March in India, this day is filled with both children and adults splashing each other with water and applying color to their faces as a motif of spreading love and combating evil. However, this version of playfulness remains over five years in the past. 

A representation of how Holi is celebrated

When I moved to the US, this day—which everyone looked forward to for the entire year—was vastly different from how I had experienced it. The cold weather and lack of community enthusiasm made it such that a day which used to be filled with loud music, massive drums of water to play with, and an air filled with color was instead entirely dull. I could not even comprehend a Holi with water. Yet here I was, playing Holi on a cloudy day in the low 50s without any room to pull out a water gun and spray the people on the streets. My memories with this festival began to morph and it became a day where we would just put some color on and move on—it began to lose its specialty.


This all changed this past weekend, where I finally had the opportunity to attend a real Holi party in the US with my friends. The Holi organized at Washington High School had almost all the elements of the event from my childhood, with the music, dancing, and colors. Not only was the atmosphere energetic, but they were even serving food through food trucks and ice cream stalls, allowing us to play for hours and then get food right after as well. While the event still lacked water due to the cold weather of the US, I once again felt close to my childhood and felt the nostalgia as I applied color onto the faces of anyone I saw around me. 


The most memorable moment in that event was when my friends dared me to apply color on someone I did not know, and with my past of shooting people off my balcony, I had no fear whatsoever. I walked up to someone and colored their cheeks; they were appropriately confused for a second, but smiled it off once I joyfully stated, “Bura na mano, Holi hai!” We went on about the event until around ten minutes later, when the man returned with his entire family and we all applied color to each other’s faces. 

Comments

  1. Jacob WangMarch 26, 2025 at 7:33 PM

    Hi Raghav! I have never heard of this Holi festival before, but it sounds like a lot of fun. I can relate to your misgivings about the "vibe" of the Bay Area, being a lot less fun. I used to live in SoCal and my memories of it were much more energetic and enthusiastic (while also MUCH warmer), but here it seems like people put much more emphasis on education as per the reputation of this place. I like how your blog illustrates how the environment around you can shape how you view your memories. It's great that in the end you still managed to find a way to partially imitate the festivals that you were used to.

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