Dasain

I thought from my last post, that I should go into further depth about this holiday called Dasain.

The holiday generally involves a lot of street festivals, a lot of Tika(yogurt,color stuff on your forehead which is like a blessing),  lots of dead animals and blood from sacrifices, gambling, and drinking. This is what I gather from descriptions I get from Nepali people, and what I have observed.  I realise that a holiday with red paint, blood filled rowdy streets, gambling, and above normal excessive drinking sounds more like a scene from a movie involving a not to distant future where society has fallen into ruin, but it is actually quite orderly.  In order for the government to keep things in order and provide for the festivities, the police up their check points the month before the holiday to collect fines/bribes, which seems perfectly acceptable and par for the course(much like speed traps at the end of the month in the US).

The game of choice for channeling the need to gamble for the Nepali people, and obviously is of great interest to me, is a game called Marriage(Perhaps a jab at arranged marriages?) .  A quick search for the rules of Marriage on the Internet return very little information so a quick description might be in order. Basically the game is like rummy, but remove some of the skill, and replace it with luck.  Even if you have the best strategy in the world, if you don't get 12 certain cards, you will not get any points, and thus lose money.  Luckily, such a game lends itself very well to drinking, so it is a good match.

Dasain seems like a great holiday for Nepal, and is really a time where everyone stops working, takes some time to relax, gets together with family and the community, and generally have a good time.  What also adds to this great holiday is the ambiguous start and end dates.  The description on Wikipedia says that it is 15 days, I have been told by many people that it is 12 days, which is also in stark contrast with the people that say it is in fact 14 days.  So really, this holiday is capable of being stretched and catered to one's own schedule, allowing one's self to reach their maximum enjoyment level.

The religious base for this holiday is Hindu, which is one of the major religions of Nepal, and involves praying, and offering sacrifices to many goddesses of the Hindu religion.  Unlike Christmas in the US, the religious part of the holiday is a very important part of the celebrations for a large amount of the population.

I was in the mountains...

-TR

A Moment of Clarity

Getting tired from the chaos of Kathmandu, I decided to go on a trek/relax session during a holiday called Dasai. Dasai is basically the Nepali version of Christmas except it is 12 days long and gambling/drinking is a major part of the celebration(my kind of holiday). I finally concluded that I should go up to the mountains, so I headed to the western part of Nepal and hung out for a few days.

In a village called Muktinath(3710meters) I decided to take some time and think while I sat outside of a temple amongst the peaceful beautiful mountains. I would like to say that I came up with some profound view on life, a new insight into my religious beliefs, or something that really brought my life into focus, but alas I did not.

Even so, one of the things that did run through my head in the small moments of clarity that I had was this:

"I still think Picard is better than Kirk."

Perhaps that is profound enough.

-TR