Reveling in Colors!
CMDFW Picnic 2009
By Manju Menon May 2009
On Saturday, April 25, 2009 the Chinmaya Mission DFW (CM-DFW) held their annual picnic at the Myers Park and Event center also known as the Collin County Youth Park in McKinney. The event is open to members and guests of members.
This annual event has grown from a mere 600 people in 2005 to almost 1900 in attendance this year. Since 2007, the highlight of the event is the boisterous celebration of the Indian festival of Holi. This festival captures the high-spiritedness of many Hindu festivals and is characterized by revelers who smear color and drench each other with colored water. Holi is the harbinger of spring and traces its origins to the time when a youthfully exuberant Lord Krishna smeared his favorite gopi (cow-herdess), Radha and her friends with color, until everyone looked no different from the Lord himself. So also the revelers of Holi, young and old, male and female all end up looking as one, merging with the resplendent colors of spring.
Myers Park sprawls over more than 100 acres and is a perfect indoor-outdoor setting for this event. Outdoor events included kite flying, 3-legged races and tug-of-war, accompanied by foot stomping, popular, Bollywood and Indian folk music. Volunteers roasted corn, whipped up crunchy bhel puri (Indian trail mix tossed with variety of garnishes) and offered spiced buttermilk for a jog down the smoky lanes of Mumbai and Delhi! The Show Barn which encloses an arena of nearly 40,000 sf held many games for the younger kids in attendance. The Show Barn also serves as a great back-up locale if the capricious Texas weather turned stormy.
On this day, weather defied all odds of an April shower and turned out perfect for a picnic. The only water that flowed was from the pichkaris (Indian water guns) of the Holi revelers who doused each other after happily lunching on billowy soft bhaturas (fried bread) made fresh on-site teamed with steaming hot chole (spicy chick peas). It was an experience that suffused the senses! The youthful and dynamic Swamiji (pastor) at the Mission, who is normally resplendent in his yellow robes was turned yellow and red drenched in Holi colors by the end of the afternoon much to the glee of Sunday schoolers.
The fun was infused with meaning and purpose by a Walkathon conducted by Sunday school students, of mostly middle school age, who got first hand experience organizing an event, selling T-shirts and obtaining pledges. They handily beat the goal of raising $5000. These funds will be donated to help settle a growing stream of refugees of Bhutanese and Nepali origin who have been resettled in the Dallas area among other US cities, by the US government. These refugees are victims of ethnic cleansing in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, that only recently received much-needed action from the UN and member nations. CM DFW made arrangements to bus these refugees to the picnic site so they could participate in the festivities – many of whom could not remember the last time they celebrated anything.
It was a memorable day of fun and revelry infused with the purpose of spirituality. CM DFW leaders look forward to a day when every child and adult, in our Metroplex, irrespective of origin, blend as one with the colors of spring and air rings with the call “Holi Hey”!
Manju Menon is a Sunday school teacher and Event Coordinator at CM-DFW.
