Krishna Janmashtami

More rediscovered pictures. These are from August 2003, my second visit to India and the first time that I ventured out on my own. On my first trip to India I stuck pretty close to the Champlain team and followed the directions of my good friend Michelle. As has become legend at Champlain - or at least I've attempted to make it a legend - there are the rules that Michelle follows overseas, which I always refer to as wearing the WWMD (What Would Michelle Do) bracelet. Even though we always travelled happily together, it did sometimes cause tension because there is a tremendous difference between WWMD (almost nothing - or maybe one new thing a trip) and WWGD (which is essentially everything). On this particular visit I decided that I had spent enough time cooped up and ventured out on my own, much to the horror/chagrin of Michelle. It was during the celebration of Krishna Janmashtami, which is Krishna's birthday. I left the walled compound of our campus and disappeared into a crowd of thousands of Hindu celebrants (and in my mind was flashing back to Larry Darrell at the end of Somerset Maugham's Razor's Edge disappearing into the mass of India). There are many aspects to Krishna's birthday celebration, and some of them are pretty fun. The one I was a part of was Dahi Handi, which commemorates the times that the adventurous/impish young Krishna would climb up on the shelf to steal buttermilk. Teams, known as govinda, travel around Mumbai and form human pyramids to reach clay pots stretched, sometimes fifty or seventy feet, above the street. The person at top tries to smash the clay pot, which showers the pyramid with buttermilk. There are also prizes for the winning teams and it is quite competitive, and often it gets tied up with politics as different parties offer cash awards. There are over 4000 handis in Mumbai alone. So, I walk around until I found one of the clay pot and waited for the teams to arrive. One of the teams adopted me as their mascot and I sat in the street and ate with them (much to Michelle's utter horror when I recounted the story). It was one of those moments which, besides just being a complete sensory overload, symbolized my own passage. I'm posting several pictures, ranging from the inside of our campus to the chaos of the street scene to the formation of the human pyramids. The next to last picture is of my team sitting down in the street to eat before the competition. I was sort of hoping that they were going to ask me to be part of the pyramid, but they had obviously spent a lot of time training - and certainly none of them wanted me to be standing on their shoulders. It was a lot of fun, but to watch the pyramids collapse, as they sometimes did, into the street looked pretty painful.