Holi

Sunday 28 Feb was the biggest day of celebrating the holiday Holi in the Kathmandu Valley. Even though the story of Holi is pretty disturbing, it seems to be a holiday about fun and color and impish mischief. The story of Holi is this: One king of demons, Hiranyakashipu, tried to kill his son Prahlada, but he could not be killed because of his intense devotion to Vishnu. Hiranyakashipu’s daughter Holika had a special shawl that kept her safe from fire; Hiranyakashipu thought that if he wrapped Holika in the shawl, put Prahlada on Holika’s lap and put both children on a pyre, Prahlada would die and Holika would live. Actually, Prahlada’s devotion to Vishnu caused the shawl to fly from Holika to him, and ultimately Holika died and Prahlada lived. Later Vishnu came and killed Hiranayakashipu. (For this information, thank you to the guy on the Pharping bus and Wikipedia.) Maybe the link between Holika dying and women getting water thrown at them is because Holika's faith in Vishnu wasn't strong enough to keep her protected from the fire, and Vishnu is associated with water, or maybe it's because water extinguishes fire. I am not sure. In any case, people of many religions celebrate Holi. This article from the Himalayan Times tells about members of Nepal's Constituent Assembly celebrating Holi.

The whole valley, from Bouddha to my village of Pharping, was full of people throwing water at each other for the past three days. Groups of kids stood around and waited for passersby they could attack with lolas, or water ammo, like balloons and squirt guns or just buckets of water. Some of the water is very dirty or colored with powder or dyes. The colors are actually quite toxic, yet all around town people were covered with powder residue and painted their faces with toxic metallic paints to celebrate. On Friday ago I rode 20km to KTM on a motorbike with my co-worker Phurba and we were pelted with three water balloons. Then Sunday morning in Bouddha, I had litres and litres of water dumped on me, many water balloons thrown, lots of water squirted at me from makeshift plastic water bottle guns, and was freezing and miserable on the 90-minute ride back to Pharping. It was like I had taken a shower. I had wet hair, was soaked through to the skin, wet underneath long underwear and my chuba and my sweater.

I guess Holi is fun--I'd feel like a spoilsport saying it wasn't fun--but actually I was uncomfortable and dirty and then anxious and irritated. Plus, mainly girls are targeted with lolas. In Holi-focused newspaper interviews, people said extreme things, like The government should regulate the selling of water guns or Boys throwing lolas should go to jail. But this type of communal neighborhood raucous activity is endemic to Nepal, and I can't imagine it will change any time soon.

Pressure Cookers

Pressure cookers: the thing of the future! Or the past. According to my mom: “It was the Big Technology of the 50’s & came to represent a Betty Crocker life, so was despised in the 60’s.” Well, they’re easy to use and efficient with resources like gas or an outdoor fire and cook really quickly and I love them.

In Nepal, a 5-ltr. pressure cooker will cook enough dal for eight people for two-three days, in under thirty minutes. First fry tomatoes and onions with masala, then add rinsed dal and fill it up with water halfway. Let it ffffssssst three times and then open it and taste—may need some more time or water or salt.

Some tips: if you’re cooking outside over a fire, smear the pot with mud—a very good insulator. Sealing the lid is tricky; realize that it’s elliptical and must be inserted with the lid handle at 90º to the pot handle. Make sure all the steam is out before you remove the lid, and if the lid still sticks, hold the steamhole open (with a piece of cloth or cardboard because it’s kind of hot) until all the steam is released and then bang the lid in.

In addition to dal, pressure cookers boil potatoes and cassava/yam-type roots so fast, bake cakes supposedly, and cook especially delicious rice (even better if you have Bhutanese or Sikkim red rice). Plus they make this fantastic loud ffffssssst sound when the steam comes out.

waking up at 5am

Recovering from having spent the past few weeks in a time zone that is 7 hours earlier, I can't stop waking up at 5am every morning. Prior to this, I had never woken up so early on purpose. Generally 5am signifies going to the airport (which is a bad feeling--I don't like airplane travel) or possibly having stayed up all night.

Waking up on my own at this time is actually not too bad. I would actually like it if didn't also mean that at 8pm I basically fall asleep wherever I happen to be. It's nice to be able to dawdle around and then find that it's only 9am. It's nice to be up early and not to have all the anxiety of having to be somewhere before it gets light out.

In conclusion, I am torn between wanting my normal sleep schedule back and wanting to embrace this opportunity for a strange sleep schedule (one of my goals in life).

Public Enemies

On the plane back from Iceland, I saw Public Enemies. I’d heard about it last year, when my book club considered reading a book about John Dillinger because it was coming out, and I remember really enjoying the posters for it, but overall, I’d more or less forgotten about it.

I’m glad it was showing on the plane, though, because while I don’t think it was a masterpiece, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The film follows John Dillinger (played by Johnny Depp) during his time after his first nine-year imprisonment. It begins with his plan to break his friends out of that jail, and continues to his death a year later. In between, we see him fall in love with Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), rob several banks, and travel around the Midwest pursued by Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) in fantastic clothes and cars.

The acting, despite some very cheesy lines, was pretty good, and I sort of enjoyed even those cheesy lines. Obviously no movie can cover all issues, and this one does really brush over women’s rights, and the media circus that seems to have been forming in a big way in this era, but I was able to forgive this while watching.

Overall, though, there was something really lovely and American about the film. The landscapes are both lush and barren, with enormous, empty apartments, gilded banks with real safes, and the omnipresent road that permeates both this movie and, I think, American culture. The costumes, also, are gorgeous, and even the simplest dresses and suits carry an air of glamour that just doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

The whole movie had the overall feel of a 1930s gangster flick, and given my love for all things 1919-1950, I enjoyed it quite a bit more than any other movie in recent memory. If you’re in the mood for a bit of a distraction, I’d say go ahead and rent Public Enemies. I can’t attest to whether it’s at all historically accurate or not, but it has some really beautiful scenes and feels appropriate for us right now.

Soundcheck's Critic's Week: The Decade in Rock

Now that I drive into work, I find myself listening to a lot of NPR, a station which used to be reserved for special road trips upstate. When I was able to leave work a little early last week, I managed to catch Soundcheck, while they were having a week where they reviewed the best music of the decade. I caught Critic's Week: The Decade in Rock, which was really interesting, and made me think much harder about a decade when I felt like music really wasn't at it's peak. I guess there was so much Britney Spears and Good Charlotte that it sort of blocked out The Arcade Fire and The Strokes and Regina Spektor and Muse and all the other great artists from the 2000s in my mind.

Ryan Schreiber, the featured critic, also noted the way that music became more and more individualized in the 2000s, citing the fact that you could look on anyone's iPod and find music that almost no one but them would know. I didn't finish the program, but I hope he expounded on the fact that having an iPod at all helps to create a sort of cult of music as personality. The collectivity of music (starting out at the basics, as most of music being created by a band, and moving toward collective music experiences like massive concerts which are then aired on television to an even more massive group of people) is starting to disintegrate just a little in the face of such individualizing technology.

Anyway, the small review is this: it was a very interesting program, and you should go listen to it. I'm planning to listen to the whole thing, and then hopefully check out the rest of the week's episodes.