Dry day for people celebrating Holi in Bengaluru due to water crisis
Bengaluru: Celebrating the arrival of spring, love and the victory of good over evil, the festival of Holi is defined by abundant water play and a riot of colours. Every year, people celebrating Holi in Bengaluru take to the streets armed with balloons and guns filled with powdered colours, ‘gulal’ and water.
Social boundaries dissolve as friends, family and even strangers drench each other in a kaleidoscope of colours. Yet this year, the festival spirit has been dampened due to the severe water crisis in parts of Bengaluru.
“In previous years, we used to celebrate the entire day, where people would play Holi starting from morning till evening. This year, we have decided to limit the celebrations to only two hours in the evening.
Moreover, it will be a completely dry celebration and completely with organic colours,” says Priyanka Roy-Sinha, who is organizing Holi celebrations in a gated community in HSR Layout. “Holi is a community-driven festival and keeping that spirit in mind, we have decided to focus on other activities
The community can get involved. Mainly, we are encouraging residents to make special Holi sweets, which will be distributed among the residents and also to some orphanages,” she adds.
Similarly, residents of a gated community in JP Nagar have also gone along with ‘water-free’ celebrations, where pitching and artificial colors are banned. “Although we are experiencing some disruptions to our water supply, we are fortunate that we have not experienced the kind of shortages that some other areas of the city are experiencing. So, keeping this in mind, we are totally going with the celebration having only organic colours. These colors are very easy to wash and do not require water like artificial colours,” says community member Pranav Shastri.
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Meanwhile, Binabi (Bengali in Bengaluru) president Ananyabrata Bhakta says the community has decided to stop celebrations altogether this year to conserve water. “It is important to enjoy festivals but not at the cost of our precious resources. Every year, 100-150 people attend our Holi celebrations. And each of them will require huge amount of water to clean after playing Holi.
Therefore, given the current water crisis, it would not be possible to celebrate and essentially waste all the water,” he added. As the water crisis unfolded in the weeks leading up to Holi, many travel experience companies and entrepreneurs took the initiative to offer unique destinations, away from the urban sprawl.
These spaces allowed people to celebrate the festival without feeling guilty or worrying about wasting water. Many of these Holi parties also featured water as the main attraction. Ankit Bhardwaj, co-founder of Banjara and Gypsy, a travel experience company in the city, says, “We are organizing two Holi parties at a few places, one is in Urban Valley on Kanakapura Road for people in the Electronic City area. To enjoy outdoor Holi along with rain dance.
The second one is in Indiranagar. On Kanakapura Road one, since it is on the outskirts, there is not much problem regarding water, so we are doing rain dance, but on Indiranagar Road, we will not do any rain dance. There may be only a few drums of water but that also depends on availability.”
