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Sunday, March 04, 2007

Holi day - festival of colours..

Most of us might enjoy this festival of colours, but I don't really appreciate the colour bit though am completely ok with the use of water (as water balloons that are used to celebrate this festival).

As usual I started around 7.45am in the morning for my Sunday morning long run and I was very much aware that today was Holi and that I would be encountering people who would be celebrating Holi in the morning & they might feel compelled to include me in their celebration!! But, that was not something that could hold me back, well nothing ever does.

I was quite surprised (pleasantly..), as I had to dodge only a couple of water balloons being thrown at me from two different building on my run. Since, I was a moving target, it was never going to be easy and I was able to comfortably avoid them. But the good thing was that nobody who was at ground level & celebrating the festival (and this includes adults from affluent backgrounds, kids, poor people, street urchins), none of them threw colour or water at me, which really talks a lot of the spirit of Bombay, I don't see this happening in most other large metros where the festival has a mass following.

Coming back to my running, I did a comfortable 17kms in 1hr 41mins, though it did not feel the same, as most of the regulars were missing at the second half of my run (where I sometimes run around Shivaji Park instead of continuing my run on the streets), as they must have been paranoid about having colour thrown at them.

I hope to continue doing 20kms on Sundays, so that I can have a good launch pad for my Leh marathon in July.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

SAK said... Looks like you did not read my comments about the pictures you put up on the blog earlier. Probably because the comments were given in the section of earlier blog entries. So I thought of placing my comments here again.
Hi, the Kala Ghoda, Mumbai Marathon, and the Vadodara pictures are all really good. My favorite are the rickshaw (made up for the festival) and the Eagle looking picture from Kamati Bag(very nicely taken,the light is reflecting and is caught really well on the statue of the bird. It reminded me of figures depicted in a Sci Fi movie. Your story of the forest experience was really something to read about, quite a scary experience. Good thing you used good judgement in how to act in that situation and things turned out good and no harm done.

@GirishMallya said...

Yes, I think so. Thanks for the comments, will continue posting some interesting pictures soon.

Bedders said...

as if running is not difficult enough already with out having to dodge water bombs! Still if it's warm I guess you try and move so that they hit you eh?

@GirishMallya said...

Just two small problems with the baloon bombs, sometimes they use coloured water (which stains clothes) and they sting!!
I would definately welcome someone pouring a bucket of water from the rooftop....