Column

I have to confess — I don’t like Holi. Or rather, I haven’t since I was about 14 years old which was so long ago that I hardly remember it, except that we all wore bellbottoms and platform heels and laughed at people who wore “drainpipes”. The trouble is that all you copycats will look around and think that I’m about 22, since everyone wears bellbottom and platform heel type things. Get this because I will say this only once: I’m talking about the 1970s.

I’ll have you know that my grandmother claimed that she wore elephant pants in the 19-olden days. We’re all copycats.

And I’m still old and I still don’t like Holi. You can play it coyly, like most Bengali women (unlike me) and sing songs;you can be wild and rambunctious like everyone else; you can sing that nasal besura song from Silsila (pray, what did people sing before the movie was made); and you can ingest cannabis sativa to your heart’s content. And you can leave me out.

So you can be sure that I won’t be part of the festivities and, not, if it comes to that, Easter, or Eid-e-Milad-un-nabi or Navroze or the vernal Equinox or the entry of the sun into Aries to start the new Zodiac year, although chocolate bunnies and any other food stuffs are always welcome. I am old and I am greedy.

The one good thing about the fact that all of you have holidays and we have only one — Friday, so no newspaper on Saturday — is that there’s no traffic on Mumbai’s roads. Glory be. That’s one way for the state government to save all that money on flyovers, freeways, trans harbour links and metro railways — permanent holidays. Oh, sorry, won’t work. How will all those politicians and officials make a little extra money on the side? Take it back: more flyovers, more freeways, trans harbour links and so on, to be completed 2042 and then extended for a few years.

Happy this, that and the other. See you on the other side

b_ranjona@dnaindia.net