India Insight

(Any opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily of Reuters)

The festival of Holi is easy on the pocket. All one needs is a packet of gulaal (coloured powder), buckets of water, friends and family; and perhaps some music and alcohol.

Holi, the festival of colours, is celebrated to mark the beginning of spring and harvest season. In places associated with the Hindu god Krishna, Holi is traditionally played over several days with revellers flinging coloured powder and water at each other.

[To view a slideshow on Holi, click here]

While the rest of India’s capital city went about its daily business on the eve of Holi, its biggest wholesale market Sadar Bazaar was teeming with last-minute shoppers stocking up on colour sprays and pichkaris (water jets).

Vendors wooed passers-by with multi-hued pouches and sacks of gulaal as customers haggled for the best bargains.

(Any opinions expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Thomson Reuters)

Indians don’t like it, but they live with it: the daily sight of people urinating, defecating and spitting in public. Most of us cringe and look away.

One woman who didn’t was Sadmani Khan, who scolded her neighbour Javed for urinating on the stairs of their home. Javed, according to an interview with Sadmani’s husband Aslam Khan, was “drunk stiff” when he relieved himself, according to an interview in the New York Times.