Durga Puja in Kolkata...

This has been one wild wild week. I mean sure, people have been in party mode for a month or so already, but Durga Puja was ...The One. (Thank you HBO for 8 continuous days of The Matrix trilogies) If anyone's interested the story behind the goddess Durga is here.

All over Kolkata, people have been spending whole fortunes building statutes of the goddess Durga. Of wildly varying quality and mostly in the same pose:

A many armed daeva carrying an assortment of weapons standing radiant and victorious over a great lion busy devouring a blue(or green) skinned man. Beautiful and frowning with righteous rage in the best classical Greek tradition. (I spent hours staring at the marble thingamabobs at the Louvre, I know classical rage when I see it ;p)

They've got one at almost every open space larger than a small house and it was quite a sight to see. Wednesday and Thursday (our 2 precious holidays) went by in a blur. I seem to recall (hazily) hours of sitting at the Kalighat flat (See Notes #1) gorging on ham and cheese. Drinking herbal tea. (Thank you Yvonne! You make excellent tea. Yes Beyhan you drink the tea WITHOUT sugar)

Making intelligent conversation. I find it enormously entertaining to make English conversation with the Japanese. Can never quite get enough of talking to Saori and her Japanese accent ;p. Of course talking about international politics really gets the juices flowing too. My old buddy Aaron would have REALLY appreciated it.

Man...I LIVE for this sort of thing (as opposed to gyrating wildly to music loud enough to bust your eardrums at 2 am in the morning...I think I'm getting old...hey wait! I never enjoyed that!).

It was at this time I truly got to know the inhabitants of the concentr--I mean flat at Kalighat. I mean I KNEW they were there, but they didn't drop by Gurusday often enough for us to know them that well. Excellent people, every last one of them.

Wednesday night we did Dandi. As with anything that AIESEC India had a hand with, it involved ear-splitting music at the wee hours of the night, paying a whole lot more than I budgetted for and always some interesting episodes to spice my blog with.

Dandi is a dance with sticks to (Surprise Surprise) loud music where once a year boys and girls get to meet each other. 25 rs for a pair of sticks (boogers), 30 rs for a 500 ml bottle of water and 100 rs for entrance fee (No free drink....can you believe that?). The management of the Dandi were really ripping us off! This time though, I was prepared. Industrial grade ear plugs....bring it on baby! Yeah!

Dancing involved banging your sticks together in some sort of rythmn either alone or (perferably) with a partner. Polly showed her enormous physical strength by breaking both sticks.

Enjoyable? Well Yes. Would I do it again? Hell No! I left early together with Saori and Polly. After escorting them home I scooted back home and called it a night.

The next night invloved a ceremony called "immersion". The landlord of our apartment in Tollygunge had a family Puja statute of Durga in his house and invited us to join his family on a lorry to the Hooghly (or the Ooogly as Max says it ;p) river where the statute would join several hundred others in the river.

The bumpy unsecured ride at the back of a shaky lorry with a 50 kilo statute (also unsecured) and 12 other people could be an epic unto itself (This excluded a special drummer boy & his drum hired specifically for this occasion). The activity going on in the back of the lorry ... well ... I'll let you judge.

Beyhan was chasing Yvonne and tried all ways and means to get close to her on the truck. Unfortunately, I was in the way. Literally. Yvonne was using me as a human shield, which of course meant WE were close together. Actually I was holding onto the side of the truck and couldn't move and SHE was holding onto ME. Nuts.

Of all the things in the world, caught in the middle in every sense of the word between a rock and a hard place. Beyhan is still pouting. C'est vraiment pas ma faut!

Notes:
(#1 )

1. AIESEC in India helped us find our quarters when we arrived in Kolkata. There are two major locations (termed trainee flats) which housed a number of international AIESEC trainees who were living and working here in Kolkata.
2. We (Me, Maxim & Beyhan) lived at one location in Gurusday road shortly before moving to Tollygunge.
3. Gurusday contained :) Sly & Jeroen(Netherlands), Keika (Japan), Mihaela "Micky" & Daniela "Dani" (Romania), Ted (Hongkong), Yi Xiang "Lucy" (PRC), Alvarro (Chile), Dorota & Adam(Poland), Emre (Turkey)
4. Khaligat sardine-d :) Agnieszka & Konrad (Polska), Saori (Japan), Yvonne (ROC), Mauricio (Puerto Rico, I think), Polly (HongKong), Some lady from Italy ... the one with the cheese.