Divali in mysore was not as radical as what we heard about Dasara... the latter is the GRAND festival for mysore: over a million folks show up to watch the crazy indulgent processions of elephants, musicians, military guards in full plumage et cetera et cetera as they celebrate the victory of a LOCAL goddess over a LOCAL demon.
Dasara is HUGE in mysore. Divali is a sort of second class celebration there.
we saw bunches of fireworks and the palace lighted up with electric bulbs all over.
an order of magnitude difference.
and we were not allowed to sleep well, because Divali has morphed from a festival of *lamps* into a festival of firecrackers.
there were some sweet moments, but it was a lot louder than i was hoping. the photo shows a sweet sight, n'est-ce pas?
1 comment:
Halloo, Miko & Hansa, from the world of circle dancing. What a pleasure it has been to trod (or slog) vicariously in your footsteps, even if we don't have a Royal Enfield 500 for the purpose. (Years ago, when we were trying to assemble a complicated spiral staircase kit that we imported from England ("Bend 1 cm thick steel bars to fit...") we needed a bunch more screws. The hardware store eventually determined that they were reverse thread, never-before seen pitch, and neither metric nor English. Turned out (after a few phone calls to England) that the staircase people had bought up a few barrels of screws from the Enfield people, when the latter had a corporate yard sale in the 60s.
Marina and I are just back from two weeks in Vancouver (she went to a teaching by her favorite Tibetan lama, Tzongsar Khyentse) and we put on a 3-day dance workshop; and then Ecuador (rainforest; Galapagos), and the travel bug is gnawing away. India will probably be the next big trip, but this reincarnation stuff had better work because it may not be this lifetime.
The dancing circle turns, as always. Life in the Bay Area manages to lurch on, suffering, as sfgate.com would tell you, from a major oil spill in the bay, that may affect lives for years to come. Crab season canceled. Point Isabel dog park closed. Accusations hurled with great fury and wild abandon. And we mourn the much-too-early death of sometime friend Phil Frank ("Travels With Farley").
All best, and to Hansa, and from Marina.
John
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