Holi

Holi, one day of going back to primal. A day of freedom from our clearly etched identities of civilised form and nature, when we let loose our common basic core as a human animal. All the components of the format of celebration-gathering of people for a purpose, colour, intoxicants, dancing on high energy music- blur our social human identities and restores us back to our animal ones. It is a restrained orgy, sublimely sexual. Which is such a relief.  To be like  just a fragment of a mass with no individual identity, and yet be able to feel and live individually. On the day, men and women are unrecognisable from normal days. In a belief that they are hidden behind the colour on their faces and the intoxicant in the eyes of others, they begin to lose the inhibition dictated by behaviour appropriate for their social position. Men become openly eager, women showy. Air is filled with under the surface simmering sexuality. Touching of faces, meeting of eyes, smiles from those who never would smile to you on any other day out of inhibition, that chasing, catching, breaching of personal space, all augmented by alcohol in the blood and music in the air is  a form of freedom that primitive human animal, buried in us on a normal day, craves and yet can’t not get. A prison of his (man’s)own rules opens the doors of its cells for one day, with in the walls of the barbed wire perimeter, for nothing can be done whose effect will be carried to tomorrow and will not fit with our social identities. So dancing becomes large part of venting of sexual energy building up in the air. Women and men go crazy. I have seen women dance like there is going to be no tomorrow. Kind of energy that is exhibited on the day gives full credence to the words of JBS that dancing is vertical expression of a horizontal desire. 

Come to think of it, there is nothing in the nature more perfectly designed than a woman to express desire, that’s the most beautiful sight of nature, the rare unification of what could be and what is. And all we do is privatise it, suppress it. Humans are so terrified of beauty that when we see it our instinct is to capture it, enslave it, destroy it. Like pigs shitting on bed of roses-with no sense of smell, tenderness or softness, just startled by bright red colour giving in to their first instinct of fear and defecating as a result. Only few can resist that first wave of exposure to beauty, surviving the terror it may impose, by over loading the senses with stimuli. This kind of overloading normally happens to man when he is in grave danger,  hence the feeling of terror on seeing the beauty. When the danger overloads the senses, instincts are trained for fight or flight, giving a quick relieving to overloaded senses. In case of beauty same or more amount of over loading of senses takes place and yet instinct do not know what to do. Training of fight or flight does not help. There is an unusually prolonged hyper over loading of senses with stimuli which are new, a newness that fails the fight or flight mechanism. Man staying filled with a sensation which is larger than danger and with a failed fight or flight mechanism, that’s the mother of all terrors, remember the nightmare where you are chased by a beast and can’t move despite trying very hard to run. In most cases the only recovery that happens is delayed firing of fight or flight mechanism in a distorted way, leading to man trying to capture, enslave or destroy the beauty. Those who stay still longer become poets, sages or God, for they have learnt to live with beauty.

-Pulastya