Ratha Yatra
on Sustainable Dignity (India), 14/Jul/2010 05:27, 34 days ago
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Corey writes:Yesterday was a major Hindu holiday here in India,Ratha Yatra(Car Festival). However, this car festival is a little different than the chrome drenched, hood scooped car festivals we're used to. These cars are huge wooden structures built by hand to carry the Lord Jagganath and his siblings to their aunt's house for a visit.Here are the gods waiting for their ride:Here are the cars:Not even Xzibit could pimp these rides any farther. They are fully pimped. (That's right, I had to use Google to find the name of the guy that hosts MTV's Pimp My Ride.)This festival is a big deal in Orissa, because the officially recognized home of Jagannath is in Puri, which is in Orissa. Each year 300,000+ people from all over the world show up in Puri to celebrate. Here in Koraput, we have a copy of the Puri temple, and a copy of the god. It's still a big deal here, with reportedly 50,000 people celebrating yesterday.By the way, I'm ripping off the content of this post from the excellentKoraput Online blog. Gina and I discovered this site recently and have been really impressed with this guy's reporting. He seems to know everything that goes on in Koraput.The reason I'm stealing this info from him is that Gina and I stayed home all day. It was raining and we didn't know what time the car procession was supposed to start. So we ended up missing it. This was another example of the osmotic information sharing in India. No one knows when things are supposed to start, but everyone gathers around the same time.Oh well, there's always next year.