Holi Pink

Happy Holi!  Today is the festival of color and spring is close at hand (although it doesn’t feel that way in New York where the city is girding itself for a massive blizzard).  We might not be in the tropical subcontinent (indeed, we might be under 3 feet of snow), but that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate some vivid color—even if I can’t literally throw it in your face.

Now I love all of the glowing shades of Holi. Indeed, with typical Hindu heterogeneousness, the festival does not have one or two colors associated with it like parsimonious western holidays, but it is a festival of all color.  However I think the most typical Holi color in my mind is the glowing beautiful magenta which you always see in pictures of Holi.  Where did that crazy color originate?

Well, actually it seems like the beautiful purples and magentas of Holi are natural and come from boiled beetroot (or sometimes kachnar powder).  This amazing glowing color comes from betacyanins–antioxidant phytonutrients which are always causing nutritionists to swoon because of anti-inflammatory benefits.  You may recognize the hue from fancy boiled eggs—and apparently beetroot can also be used to dye yarn and fabric.

I would love to talk more about this exquisite magenta, but according to an earlier post, it doesn’t exist.  That is a paradoxical conclusion to reach on the holiday of colors, but Holi comes from the same cosmology which gave us Kali, the goddess of destruction—and ultimate creation.  Ponder the vicissitudes of color and non-color as we gear up for spring and have a happy Holi!

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