Holi, festival of love and colours, is duly celebrated at TARA!

On Monday, March 13, 2017, the TARA Boys, the TARA Girls and a whole bunch of volunteers, staff members and friends of TARA gathered in Lodhi Garden to celebrate Holi, the famous Indian festival of colours.

This event traditionally marks the end of the winter and the beginning of the harvest, but it is especially for the children the opportunity to smear vivid colors on each other, to lounge in the mud and to use watering hoses as weapons of their revenge against the adult staff!

The children met in the morning in the large and shaded park of Lodhi Garden, armed with sachets of (organic!) colors and water pistols. Their faces did not remain unscathed for long, the game consisting of covering every centimeter of skin with rose, yellow, purple, green or blue colors until the children were hardly recognizable. The adults were not left behind and the multicolored faces soon drifted, following repeated attacks of sophisticated water pistols, fully emptied buckets of water and powerful hoses.

When colors and reserves of water were exhausted, the eldest children made a point of carrying the staff triumphantly and leaving them … in a huge pool of mud! That is a well-known fact: to get rid of the body mask that water and sun-dried colors for on the skin, nothing works better than a mud bath in the gardens of Delhi.

After this unconventional spa and the rematch by the staff, the stomachs started to groan and the snack prepared under the aegis of Coraline (director of the Guesthouse Bed and Chai and Supreme Organizer of Holi for TARA every year ) was warmly acclaimed. Biryani, nutella pancakes and toffees were swallowed within seconds; the digestion minutes that followed helped calm the game and allowed to take some pictures of this iconic celebration.

But the "hostilities" quickly resumed and those who were unfortunate enough to have washed their faces were the first victims ... The children are not novices, some had kept aside a few sachets of color so as to restart the game unexpectedly!

Finally, because a tatami is not worth a mellow lawn, the children competed in jiu-jitsu clashes where the TARA Girls confirmed their mastery in front of the adults, stunned by their agility, strength and technique. The TARA Boys were careful not to compete against them!

When exhaustion gained even the eldest and all the reserves were finally exhausted, the staff took over the authority they had conceded and gathered scattered shoes, accessories and children to go back to the Home where the rest of the day was spent trying to erase any trace of the colors which had covered everyone, from the root of their hair to the nails of their toes.

Finally clean, the children are already looking forward to next year...