Another note: Blogspot has been weird about uploading pictures again lately. Even though I chose pictures for this post, I have not been able to upload them. I've tried for a few days now, but I realized I would never post this if I didn't do it now. So here ya go!
I’m on my way back to Thiruvananthapuram from Thrissur right now. I had brought my laptop with me because the hotel promised WiFi. Well, the WiFi wasn’t working, but at least I can do something productive during these seven hours: write a blog post! [Well, ok, I didn’t finish it, obviously, since I’m posting this several weeks late.]
I went to Thrissur with Manju this weekend [actually who knows how many weekends ago it was? April 23-25] for the Thrissur Pooram. I have to be honest, I still do not know the significance of this festival. No one could explain it to me, so I think perhaps people just like elephants. (I sure do!) Maybe Wikipedia can explain this festival to you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrissur_Pooram
People in Thrissur love to say that the Pooram is not a Hindu festival (seemed pretty Hindu to me… I mean, it took place at a Hindu temple and the elephants were carrying Hindu gods) because Muslims and Christians participate in the preparations for the event (someone told me that Christians make the gold caparisons and Muslims make the silk umbrellas, but I don’t know if this is true or not) and people of all religions come to watch the spectacle unfold.
Yesterday [Saturday April 24] morning we arrived at the Vadakkunnathan Temple to find three caparisoned elephants lined up outside. I went picture-crazy, obviously unaware of the many more elephants to come. We then went inside the temple to find three more elephants, accompanied by a band. Someone told us the real action was on the west side of the temple—and they were right. There was a line of elephants in front of the temple entrance and another line of elephants approaching from the western gate. We didn’t know which line to watch first! We soon discovered that several more lines of elephants, accompanied by great fanfare, would come to the temple. Four lines (if not more that we had already missed??), in fact. We watched these elephant processions and the dancing crowd for a few hours. A video can explain this better than words:
elephant procession (if you have a short attention span, stop watching at 1:10; the video pretty much repeats itself after that)
Later in the afternoon, we decided to go inside the temple to see the famed 300-drummer band. Well, everyone else wanted to go inside too, so the line was ridiculously long. We didn’t particularly want to wait in this line, so we snuck around to the backdoor entrance—to find an “Elephant-Related Emergencies” vehicle, an ambulance, and a bunch of Western tourists taking pictures of these vehicles and generally getting in the way of emergency personnel. As Manju and I quickly backed away from the scene, I said a little too loudly “what the hell is wrong with these tourists that they want to take pictures of emergency vehicles? Don’t they know they’re getting in the way during a serious situation?” and received several Stares of Death from those very tourists. (Since we escaped the situation as fast as we could, we didn’t find out until later what happened. Apparently one “tusker,” as the newspaper called the elephant, collapsed from heat exhaustion, and then the elephants on either side of him got spooked. The three elephants were immediately replaced [several elephants are held in reserve] and no human was injured.)
We decided it was probably a bad idea to enter the temple, because we didn’t know what this “elephant-related emergency” was, and if an elephant freaked out, it could be an ugly situation with so many people in a small enclosed area. We wanted to see a band though, and someone told us there was another big band on the south side of the temple. So we rounded the corner and saw a band—in front of yet another elephant procession (seriously, I lost count). We joined the crowd to watch.
As the crowd became increasingly condensed (as the line of elephants approaches the temple, there becomes less and less space between the temple and the elephants for the crowd to stand), people started getting pretty rowdy. Manju and I wanted to get out of this crowd, and fast. We tried to head toward the west gate via an empty field below the elevated walkway on which the crowd was standing, but someone told us fireworks were being set up. Then we tried to go toward the elephants and around them, to exit via the north gate. There were too many people—a tall person next to us counted the heads in front of him and said the crowd ahead was 16-people deep—and we couldn’t manage to get through. The only other direction was toward the temple, but there was a huge queue to enter and we couldn’t even figure out how to get to the queue from where we stood (er, line. I’ve started using Indian English sometimes). Finally we found a policeman and asked him for help, pulling the “we’re women and need protection” line (actually, it was true that the vast majority of people in this crowd were men, and someone had grabbed my ass). Instead of escorting us or creating a corridor for us to pass through or doing anything else policeman-like, he told us to jump down to the empty field to get to the west gate. “But someone told us they are setting up fireworks there,” I protested. “No, no, fireworks later. Safe now.” So, we fought our way through the crowd and jumped.
…into a field of exploding fireworks.
Mid-air I realized that someone was lighting the fireworks. When my feet hit the ground, three fireworks rockets went off about a meter away from me. I don’t know what scared me more, the deafening BOOM!s or the tails of fire in the rockets’ wakes. We quickly realized that more than just this set of fireworks would be lit, and we were now in this field. As we ran out, fireworks went off right behind our heels—it almost felt like being in a movie or something. [Ok, fine, I’m dramatizing a bit. We were running along the edge of the field and the fireworks were going off about a meter to our left—but milliseconds after we passed them—and this entire episode probably lasted less than 10 seconds.] When we reached the end of the field and entered the watching crowd, I was shaking. And everyone around me was laughing at the stupid foreigner and her Indian friend who ran through [er, actually, next to] the fireworks. I blame the policeman. (They really need to do a better job cordoning off unsafe areas, especially with a crowd like this. Why was there no rope or other barrier? Oh wait... this is India.) (As a side note, we would later find out that these rockets were actually more similar to dynamite than fireworks, and were meant only to create really loud noises. How does this not scare the elephants?)
After barely escaping the crowd and fireworks, we headed to what we didn’t realize was an even bigger crowd. We wanted to get a good position for kudamattam, the main event of Thrissur Pooram, so we decided to head there about an hour and a half early. Apparently a lot of other people had this idea too. Manju then came up with the brilliant idea: head to the “Welcome Foreign Guests to Thrissur Pooram!” section. This foreigners’ section was on an elevated platform pretty close to the temple and, more importantly, above the crazy crowd. Normally I despise special treatment for foreigners, but in this case I was grateful. Unfortunately, the foreigners’ section was on the opposite side of this crowd. We burrowed our way through the crowd like prairie dogs (or some other animal that burrows) and emerged, miraculously unscathed, at the stairwell to the foreigners’ platform. When we walked up, a policeman wanted to see our pass. We didn’t even know we needed a pass! I just pointed at my white skin. We got a laugh out of the policeman but no permission to enter; we should have picked up a pass at a Kerala Tourism office days ago, he explained. (As a side note, the Chief Minister of Kerala and his posse sat in the front row of the foreigners’ section. So I guess it was more like a VIP section?)
We went back down and stood in front of the platform, because that area was roped off and other people weren’t permitted to enter. We had plenty of room and a good view. But alas, the crowd was big, real big, and there was limited space. Soon enough the uncontrollable crowd kept growing and had extended to this area. A policeman who was supposedly ensuring this area remained roped off and free of insane numbers of people got scared and squeezed between the bars holding up the platform to hide underneath the platform. Coward. (And Manju couldn’t stop laughing. She thought this was the most hilarious part of our entire insane day.)
As the crowd got, well, more crowded, we were pressed up against the platform bars. We knew we wouldn’t be able to see anything, besides the fact that it was really sweaty and slightly painful. That’s when we realized the scaredy-cat policeman’s move wasn’t a bad one. I looked back under the platform and saw that we could climb onto the stairwell from underneath. So we squeezed through the bars, stopped for a second underneath the platform to breathe and enjoy not touching any other sweaty bodies, and climbed onto the stairs from behind. No one stopped us from standing in the stairwell, as long as we didn’t enter the platform. The stairs actually gave us an amazing unobstructed view of both the elephants and the crowd! (I found the crowd just as interesting as, if not more interesting than, the elephants. There were even crowd surfers!)
This is what 500,000 people look like.
So what was this crowd so excited to see? Priests on elephants holding umbrellas. Yes, umbrellas. Two lines of caparisoned elephants, each line from a rival temple in Thrissur, faced each other in an epic Umbrella Off (to use Zoolander terminology). Basically, each temple’s priests alternated switching umbrellas. Every time new umbrellas were hoisted on the elephants, the crowd went wild. Putting their hands in the air and yelling at the top of their lungs, people cheered like their favorite cricket player just scored a 6 to win the match in the last over (or to use a more American analogy, like their favorite football player just scored a touchdown when the team was down by 6 with only a few seconds left to win the game). …but for pretty silk umbrellas. I found this hilarious. This “exchanging of umbrellas,” as people called it, went on for almost 2 hours. A bit long for just umbrellas, in my opinion.
Umbrella exchange
The Umbrella Off
That night, or really morning (at 3am), a massive number of fireworks were scheduled to go off. Seats on rooftops were sold out days in advance to witness this spectacle. The other option would be to watch from the street, with another huge crowd. We decided that, since we’d seen fireworks before, it wasn’t worth getting up at a ridiculous hour just to stand in a huge crowd. I don’t know if the fireworks started late or just weren’t that loud yet, but at 4:45am the ridiculously loud fireworks woke me up. And continued until 6am. It sounded like the city was under siege, like hundreds of bombs were going off.
When we woke up for the morning (only about an hour and a half later), we decided to go to the temple to see what it’s like on a quieter day. Well, actually, the pooram was still going on. When we arrived at the temple, we saw a line of elephants approaching again. As awesome as elephant processions are, we had had enough of big crowds. So we entered the temple via the backdoor, and it was surprisingly empty. Afterwards, we headed to the Thrissur Pooram Exhibition. Silly me, I can never throw away my American expectations. I thought “exhibition” would mean an exhibit, perhaps about the history of Thrissur Pooram, how the elephants are trained, how the temple and priests prepare, etc. Well, I was totally off the mark. Instead of learning more about the festival, I found dozens of booths selling everything from clothes to kitchenware to solar water heaters, rides (ferris wheel, swinging pirate ship, spinning tea cups, etc), and random exhibits/propaganda by government agencies such as the space agency and the military. My favorite “ride” was a tiny tank with a small motor boat driving in circles. Manju was quick to point out that we’re in the state of backwaters—don’t a lot of these people ply the waters every day? Aren’t there plentiful opportunities to ride in a boat? Very silly.
When we finished laughing our way through the exhibition, we headed to Paramekkavu Temple, one of the two rival temples. Manju went inside to pray, but I wasn’t allowed to go with her. Instead, I took a picture of this funny sign:
so, what am I allowed to wear? (by the way, the Hindi says the same thing, though I can't speak for the Malayalam and Tamil)
We left the temple to find the elephants returning from the day’s events. It was time, finally, to remove all the ornaments (but not all the chains. sad), take a bath, and eat some food! Here are some pictures of the newly-naked, and probably relieved, elephants:
Er, image upload fail.
After watching the elephants enjoy their relative freedom, we headed for lunch at the Indian Coffee House, a chain that is unfortunately not as good in Kerala as in Madhya Pradesh (Mom and Dad: we went there in Bhopal, the restaurant with the guys in funny white hats, remember?). At the end of our lunch, we heard what sounded like bombs (again). The pooram ends with one last pyrotechnic display, but because it’s during the day, it is more a sound than light show. And boy, did this sound actually show! The windows were rattling like mad with each BOOM. We went outside to see the spectacle (Indian Coffee House is across the street from the temple)—and we could feel the sound waves hitting us. The sound waves almost hurt, actually, especially in my chest. They were quite forceful! This of course totally freaked me out, so we went back inside the restaurant. But the windows were shaking so much I thought they were going to pop out!
After the first round of sound bombs, we ran to a line of autorickshaws to go back to our hotel, as it was almost time for our train. But no one wanted to go because a second round was about to start—unclear if they didn’t think it was safe (the visibility was pretty poor, as the pyrotechnics had turned the air into smoke) or if they wanted to watch the show. So we walked halfway back before finding an auto willing to take us, took showers, and headed to the train station.
And now here I am, sitting on the train, typing away.
One last note on the elephants: I felt really bad for these creatures. It’s already sweat-your-balls-off hot and humid (mid- to high-90s F and 90% humidity), then you throw really heavy gold caparisons and other ornaments on them. Plus the umbrellas are huge and putting a lot of pressure in one small spot where the pole rests on their head. On top of all this, three people are standing and dancing on top of them. Meanwhile, a band with loud drums and horns is playing right in front of them and a crowd of 500,000 people is screaming and cheering. All this noise not scary enough for them yet? Let’s add the physical sound wave-inducing bomb fireworks. It’s a miracle only one elephant collapsed and zero elephants freaked out. Seriously, these elephants are damn well trained. I have a lot of respect for these animals and their mahouts.
Didn't read the entire post - really long :). Will do so in bits and pieces. I was at the Pooram too this year. And you just goaded me out of my laziness to blog about my Kerala trip. Thanks! And nice videos.
ReplyDelete