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Holi Festival - Phagwah
Orlando City Soccer Stadium opens and the Lions are ready to roar!!
Bonfires of Vanities
P
By Kamal Abdool
ackets of vivid powders would lie on the formica kitchen table like scattered pieces pulled from a pretty patchwork quilt. Bags of iridescent green prismatic crystals glittering in the morning sunlight and bottles of scented white talcum would emerge from my mother’s sturdy vine-woven market basket, in preparation for the annual Hindu festival of Phagwah or Holi. A riot of colors that signifies the start of spring, the exhuberant celebration of Phagwah during the Hindu month Phalgun came with the immigrants who left Bhojpur and other parts of India for the tropical West Indies, in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hence Phaguwa in the distinct Bhojpuri dialect still survives as the original name of the joyous national holiday in Guyana, while Holi is derived from the Hindi. My mother, born nearly a century ago, was continuing an ancient custom, brought by her parents to their uncertain new world. These enduring traditions had their deep roots in an agrarian society where the end of winter signaled the start of new life and renewed fertility, and reinforced the belief in a natural order and constant cycle that were reassuring and reaffirming in their predictability, while comforting for the classic message of justice and good overcoming evil...Continued on Page 17
Orlando City officially opened its downtown stadium with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and a confetti cannon. All of the Orlando City front office, including Life-
President Phil RaRawlins, came out to watch the dream realized of symbolically opening the stadium for business. A number of Orlando ...Continued on Page 6