Posted: March 31, 2017, 5:50pm
This year has been full of firsts. Surprisingly, this year was my first holi. Though it’s a popular festival in India, I never had a chance to celebrate holi. When I was young, I always had exams during holi. Then when I got older, I stopped caring about it. But when I heard that one of the student organizations at USC was hosting this event, I was beyond thrilled to take part in it.
The event started around 3.30 PM and we were the first few people in the queue. We checked in earlier and entered the McCarthy Quad. The event was hosted by Association of Indian Students (AIS). They did an excellent job in having an organized check-in. The turn-out for the event was huge and the crowd was very diverse. They hired a DJ for the event who played Bollywood music. Around 4:30 PM they started distributing the pichkari aka water guns. Now that we were equipped with pichkari, it was battle time. It doesn’t matter if you know the other person or not, you just target them with the water gun. There is a very popular phrase that is used during holi which goes something like this: “bura na mano holi hain” which means “don’t feel bad because it’s holi”. We had fun playing with water and colors. AIS also arranged some food for us which included the samosa, spring rolls and my all time favorite cold badam milk ( aka almond milk).
I’m so glad that USC provides a platform and resources to organizations that want to showcase different cultures. Every effort is made, here at USC, to make sure that every person irrespective of where they come from, feel belonged. Every month we have a coffee hour at the office of international students and very often they try to organize it around a particular culture. For example, the previous month was the international tea time and the theme was Japan. I loved the green tea flavored ice cream they served us. Professor Beau, our wellness dog, also made a visit to the event. 
Picture credits to my good friend Nilanjan Guha 🙂
Published on July 25th, 2017
Last updated on August 10th, 2017