Sankranthi and Bhogi

I would say this is my first real Sankranthi celebration as I don't think we've ever visited India in January. I remember the cultural shows we attended to celebrate Pongal, but I don't remember us celebrating Sankranthi in a significant manner in Montreal or in California.

The celebration started on Tuesday evening at Ravi and Shilpa's place. We poured bhogi pallu mixed with puffed rice, and change on the children and this was followed by a delicious meal prepared by Lakshmi Pinni. The kids were quite intrigued as they never sat through that ceremony before. Ravi has those pictures and I'll post them once I get a copy.

After dinner, we all headed back to our place, My four cousins (Ravi, Shilpa, Revant & Mithun), my nephew, Prachet and Chanti Babai and Lakshmi Pinni stayed up through the night chatting, playing carroms and having Wii competitions. It was a lot of fun having everyone sleep over at our place. Then in the wee hours of the morning, they set up a bonfire (bhogi). I say "they" because I was still sleeping when they were trying to get the bonfire to burn. The significance of bhogi is that we should collect all the items we want to discard and burn them as a way to clean out the house. Needless to say, we only burnt wood. Also bhogi is supposed to be done the day before Sankranthi but there was no way we could have pulled that off on a working day. Later on, Shilpa, Pinni and Sindhu drew muggulu (rangolis) in front of our house. We went for a long walk in the colony and a huge pack of monkeys were enjoying themselves at the clubhouse. They were running around the tennis courts, swinging on the treees and playing in the playground on the swings and sliding down the slides, and swinging from the monkey bars, they were having a ball. Then we watched a movie, had mirpakai (chilli) pakoras and called it day as Thursday is a working day. The kids then went to play with their friends for a couple of hours and Prasad and I chilled at home. It was a very relaxing and memorable Sankranthi.