Navratri Part I: Dance Dance Revolution.
25,000 people dancing at a Garba in Baroda.
Navratri took over Ahmedabad and Gujarat over the last 2 weeks. Officially, Navratri, which means nine nights in Sanskrit, is the Hindu festival honoring the Goddess Durga and, depending on the state, is celebrated through dance, fast and/or prayer.
Unofficially, in Gujarat, Navratri is the most social time of the year as people dance until the early hours of the morning. The types of dances are garba (circular dance with coordinated foot and handwork) and raas (yes, Ernie, just like raas chaos, where people perform a variation of garba with small wooden sticks). Unfortunately for me, the dance I know best, Raas, is an urban myth – no one does it. Supposedly as Navratri has become more commercialized (see the sponsor signs above), Raas was dropped due to safety concerns (thousands of people hopping around with sticks?).
Commericalized Garbas.
I went to garbas growing up and I wish now that I had used that time to learn proper garba rather than playing parking lot football with my cousins or sitting in the bleachers. Oh well.
The venues in Ahmedabad range from parking lots of apartment buildings to giant football field sized plots and people of all age groups in both traditional and modern outfits either come to participate or to watch. With the lack of any social scene outside of restaurants in A’bad (they just closed all the hookah bars), the large venues are a hot spot for local twenty-somethings. More conservative parents accompany their kids, but children with July birthdays are known as “Navratri kids”…
Lacoste entering the traditional Indian clothing scene.
(My Navratri pictures are uploaded to Picasa and can be accessed from the link on the right; I have a bunch of videos, but my internet connection isn’t strong enough to upload them)
finding rickshaw. 