September 4th was Lord Krishna’s birthday. One of the stories about him is that as a mischievous child he would break open the handi pot and drink the butter milk from inside it. The handi pot is a short, squat pot with a little lipped opening at the top. It is hung like a pinata for the festival (I don’t know if it is normally hung up or if it is just for the celebration) and people try to break it like Krishna did. It is hung up high, and people have to form a pyramid to get someone high enough to crack the pot with their head.
Big groups of people get ready for this, and different handis around the city have different prizes attached to them. People form teams and practice getting into pyramids. So 20 people might be standing at the first layer, and they hold up 10-15 people, and they hold up 7-8 people, and so on so that the top person is way high off the ground trying to break the pot.
Newspapers the next day had the stats on how many deaths, how many injuries. Only one death, and really the fatality came from a guy being drunk and falling off a balcony during the festivities, so no one can really blame Krishna for that. About 300 injuries though. All in good fun.
I tried to find some links to local pictures of the event, but couldn't get the internet to give me anything. Oh well. There were some good pictures in the paper of clusters of people holding up clusters of other people. And people falling off towers of people.
2 comments:
I'm sure one could find similar statistics about deaths from our various holidays - how many die, how many are maimed on 4th of July?
Still, dying from a ladder. Another really good travel story (albeit unfortunate for those involved.)
Didn't mean to say "ladder". Meant to say "human ladder".
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