Pogaloow Pongal! Pogalooow Pongal! Happy Pongal :)

These are some of the elderly people from the old age home making preparations for the first day of Pongal. This is a festival celebrated in the south of india whereby you give thanks for the harvest. They make detailed patterns on the ground with powder and after fill it with colours. These designs could also be seen outside all the houses in Kasuva Village. The plants on the background are sugar that we took down and chewed after the festival. Very tough but incredibe sweet and juicy.
It is tradition to cook pongal (a sticky rice dish than can be savoury with black pepper and potatoes or sweet with sugar dried fruit nuts and cardamon( outside on a new painted pot, see the terracotta bowls under unlit wood. Then, as the water boils over (indicating it is now time to put the rice in) everyone surrounded and shouted as loud as they could "pogaloow pongal, pogaloow pongal".  The kids were so excited it was a loud happy atmosphere :)

 On the second day you give thanks to the cows. So we decorated them with flowers, leaves, colored paper etc etc, and fed the bananas! The one on the left is from Kasuva Village.

The founder of Sevalaya is seen below giving the first one, up until now i had no idea cows could eat bananas but they seemed to love it!

On the third day you should clear your house of any waste from the year and burn it outside. However most of our waste nowadays is plastic which isnt so nice to burn.. so instead of doing this Sevalaya conducted an "anti-plastic-burning ralley" in which other schools from different villages were involved. I accompanied them marching for 2 hours with placards and chanting "plastic ay ira car ay" which i think translates as burning plastic causes cancer. It was very well organised and i was impressed by the kids 'green' spirits.