My second holi with friends! Was crazy to speak the least. I was never a Holi-person. My entire childhood is full of only observations of people playing with the colors. I always liked to maintain a distance, and watch.

Earliest recollections are of my parents and a whole lot of their friends. They would all come to our place in a car. Dad, in white kurta-pyjama would go with them somewhere.  Couple of hours later when they returned , dad would look like a ghost! His white kurta-pyjama now with patches of red, pink, green and blue colors all over. His chappals and feet smeared in abeer, applied by his junior colleagues as a mark of respect.

Then came the tussle. Mom wouldn't let dad enter the house in his "ghastly and colored" state. Dad, in turn would pull mom out of the house and overturn a packet full of abeer over her. Other friends would join, as I watched, sometimes from the balcony and sometimes from a distance somewhere.

One of dad's colleagues (we called him 'tauji')  would live in the same building as ours. I very vividly remember how dad hurriedly took us (my sister and me) to the balcony one Holi morning, himself carrying a bucketful of colored water. Tauji, all bathed and beaming in his new, sparkling white kurta-pyjamas was standing downstairs just below our balcony.  With a startling splash, the entire bucketful of water was dropped onto tauji! Bewildered, and with water dripping from all over him tauji looked up, and we all screamed in unison, "Bura na mano Holi hai!!" With that, all our mischiefs were pardoned.

That's the magic of Holi.

Smeared in color, everybody appears the same. Nobody is rich, nobody is poor. They are all red and blue and green.