onam and onwards

We have completed our first round of Onam celebrations here in Kerala. Quite a holiday. I managed to take some pictures and post them on Flickr. Basically, we had two days of celebrations, one with our Field Placements/Live Labs and the second with the students of Rajagiri. The student’s celebration was a bit more…eventful, and by eventful I mean bordering on mayhem. But only a good way.

Basically Onam is bigger than Christmas here. It’s 10 full day festival that turns out, is extremely exciting and enjoyable. Good old wikipedia can give you more information. Easy to see why it’s such a big deal here. I gave you a brief (albeit confusing) overview of the holiday in my previous post, so I won’t bore you with the extensive details. Moral of the story- Onam is a big deal, a holiday full of traditions that affect every aspect of life. Including how you dress, what you eat, and what you do.

We donned sarees for the first time and managed to muddle our way through two days with the most grace and dignity we could manage. (Not that much, but no public disagrees either, so I consider it to be a success). We wore traditional Kerala sarees- cream sarees (not a good color choice in a climate where the remains of monsoon season often leave our walk to school rather muddy) with a gold border along side of another color. We also covered our arms in bangles, pinned jasmine flowers in our hair, and weighed our ears down with traditional Onam earrings. My highlight of the Onam dress is that I managed to buy the entire get up for less than 10 USD. I was rather proud of that.

Apart from the outfits, we enjoyed two days of Sayda lunches (traditional meal on the banana leaf), we watched the traditional Onam dance performed by the women (the same dance that we started to learn…and only know about 12 moves), heard numerous Onam songs, and got to try our hand at Onapookkalam- a color flower petal decoration arranged on the ground in elaborate ways. Both the Onam songs and Onapookkalam creating were turned into a contest between the different live labs, and the different student classes (ie- 2nd year MSW vrs 2nd year MCA). The first day I am proud to say that my field, CASP, managed to win first in all the contests. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that we are the largest live lab on campus, but I’m still proud. Our MSW Onapookkalam design didn’t fare so well, but still looked rather nice. The student celebration was a bit more rambunctious and class pride was running high. It was eerily similar to being in a high school pep rally. The students celebration added on a couple of events that were not included in the live lab celebration. Mainly a massive tug-of-war game and the most dangerous version of piñata imaginable. The pictures do a great job at capturing these moments, but basically a group of students are blindfolded, spun around and walked to different parts of the courtyard, given giant sticks and turned lose. The goal is to break a small clay pot swinging from a rope in the middle of the courtyard, the one to break it wins, and its showered not with candy, but with water contained in the pot. Basically it just ended up being students stumbling around blind hitting themselves and bystanders in the head. Be sure to look for the pictures with the girl and green and read my description about her. Easily the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time, highest of comedy. That girl was out for blood. Well, actually she was out for the pot, but probably ended up drawing blood from someone.

By the end of both days we were exhausted and uncomfortable (sarees can have that affect) but rather happy. Everyone is in high spirits and it’s hard not to get into the spirit of the “season.” Everyone loved the effort that we made to fit in with the traditional clothes and we fielded many complements and fuss over us, and were repeatedly told that we were "very nice Kerala girls".

As you know, the next couple of weeks are a little busy, so I’ve made an attempt to catch you up with all of our recent ongoings. Tomorrow officially starts the month of non-stop chaos, as I quickly move from one location to another, and even move around 6 or 7 separate countries. Understandably, I will be MIA for a little bit, as we are off to the wedding and Rural Camp tomorrow.

We went to a meeting the other day about rural camp and it's pretty exciting. We are apparently cleaning out a canal so that two villages downstream can have water, and also draining and irrigating patty fields and planting (sowing?) rice! It should be fun and probably incredibly disgusting. Apparently I'll be trumping around in knee-thigh high water ( and dirt, sewage, diseases...) the entire time. And sleeping directly on the floor in a small room with all of the other students, waking up at 5. A little bit of roughing it never hurt anyone before. I am mostly excited to experience a bit of ethnography, in fully immersing myself and working alongside with the villagers in this rural area. The main day of Onam is the 12th so we are doing cultural programmes all day with the villagers. Should be a pretty great and challenging experience. However, no cameras allowed so I’ll have to rely on my expert story telling to fill you in about it. Tata till then my loves!