It’s that time of the year again when I feel like I’m in a Nazi camp. After all these years, I’m still shaken and upset by the number of deaths on one day. It’s Bakri Eid and I’m still struggling.

Some parts of the city are like cattle fairs running full steam. There are goats, sheep, cows and camels spread out and people haggling over them. The smell of cattle hits your nostrils way before you actually see the animals and then before you know it, you are passing through a sea of animals waiting for death. Over the years this smell of cattle has become the smell of death for me.

As a child of maybe ten or so I remember sneaking out to watching a sacrifice after being specifically instructed by my parents not to. I watched horror struck and ran back in shocked and terrified by what I had seen. It wasn’t the death I think that scared me, it was the slow death, the struggle and the fact that someone would take a life so easily.

Some years later my parents went through the whole ritual of a sacrifice. They brought in a goat, fed and kept it for a year and then sacrificed it. I went through those emotions of horror again, only this time it was heightened by emotional attachment. That if I remember right, it was the last time my parents did a sacrifice at home. (Now they do it in other ways)

Fast forward to now. Over the last 4 years I’ve been feeding my dogs raw meat. What that means in that I go to the meat and chicken shop and buy the meat. I haven’t watched a cow being slaughtered but I have watched tons of chicken being killed. After all these years I had thought that I had been toughened, that the slaughter wouldn’t horrify me anymore.

But that ride through the cattle filled street shook me up. I was all teary eyed by the time I got to the end of the stretch. The thought of what awaited those animals filled me with pain and sorrow.

Let me get something straight: I am a non-vegetarian and I eat almost every kind of meat and all of this seeing and feeling is not going to make me a vegetarian. It’s not the killing of a few goats or cows or chicken that has me upset. It’s the sheer numbers that will be slaughtered on Eid that shakes me. The numbers will across a million easily across the world.

That’s a million lives taken on one day. It’s a mass murder. And most of this meat will be wasted, or put away into storage, it will not be consumed immediately. So we aren’t killing for food but rather killing for religion, killing for what we believe in.

How is that different from what the Nazi’s did or what the jihad groups and militant groups doing? Or does the fact that they are not human lives make it ok?

I don’t have the answers and I’m still all jumbled and confused in my head and heart about Bakri Eid. I don’t know, I just don’t know whether to rejoice or drown in sorrow, I don’t know…

Holi is the festival of colour. Like almost all festivals in India it has a story – in Hindu mythology Prince Prahlada was resented by his father, the king Hiranyakashyapa. The demon king was a cruel man and forced his subjects to worship him and no other god. But his son defined him and continued to worship Lord Vishnu. The king attempted to kill his son in many ways but failed every time. He then asked his sister Holika who was immune to fire to sit with the boy in a huge fire. But the king was thwarted again when Prince Prahlada walked out of the fire unscathed while his sister burned to death. The day is thus celebrated as a victory of good over evil, a day to rejoice.

Holi also signifies the end of winter and the time of the spring harvest. As houses are refilled with grain after the winter it is a time to celebrate and make merry. Holi also brings in the first spring showers of the year and breaks the heat wave that is just starting to announce summer.

This Holi as I watched the kids play with colour and water guns I remembered the Holi’s of my childhood. I wish someone had told me then and I had been able to comprehend just how short those fun years would have been. I might have filled them with more memories and valued it a lot more.

The day before Holi was a day of terror for Mom I think; she hoped we’d get back home without getting into any colour trouble. Washing the colour out of our uniforms would have been a nightmare. So colour was banned when we were in uniform but then when has that stopped kids. We played Holi with plain water, filling water in our bottles and chasing each other while squirting. We came home drenched to hear words from Mom but they weren’t so bad, after all there was no colour to wash 😀

The day of Holi was something I looked forward to, it was the day to go out there and get as dirty as possible – every shade of the rainbow. The kids on our street would get together, each bringing colours and then it was a melee. You tried to colour others while avoiding the colours being thrown at you but secretly you wanted to be the most colourful too. We made little water balloons and had water fights, even hid on balcony’s and aimed at passersby 😀 I still remember the year I came home with silver colour in my hair; it took ages to wash away.

And then there was that Holi party we had in college. Our gang got together in a riot of colour but it didn’t end there. We followed it up with eggs and engine oil. Yuck, I know. You should have seen Mom wrinkle her nose at the smell in the bath after we cleaned up 😛

Those days were fun and yes, it still is fun to play Holi but what I wouldn’t give to be that child again chasing another kid down the street with a fistful of colour.

Photo Credit: rudresh_calls