Ashish Lohorung Rai

Today is the Udhauli festival of all Kirati people. It is believed that from this day the winter season starts. So people, birds and animal migrate from cold regions to warmer regions. This kind of migration occurs twice in a year. The celebration of migrating downwards during this season is called “Udhauli (उधौली)” and the celebration of migrating upwards during the season of Baisakh (April or May) is called “Ubhauli (उभौली)“.

Kirati people performs a speacial kind of dance called “Sakela” in this event playing various muscial instruments like Dhol, Jhyamta etc and wearing “Chhit ko Guneu” (specially patterened cloth) by Kirati women. This event of Kirati people has also been stated in Mundhum (holy book of Kirati people). This event is also called “Bhumi Puja” (Worship of Land) where Kirati people worship mother nature asking for good cultivation of crops during the season of April and thanking the god for giving good crops during this current season.

The legend of the celebration of Sakela as stated in Wikipedia is as follows:

तपैहरुलाई यो चाड कस्तो लाग्छ ? कमेन्ट गरेर आफ्नो बिचार दिनुहोस । हैप्पी सकेला….!!

Gone 9th August was the most remarkable day for the indigenous people (IPs) all over the world. Here in Nepal many different IPs related organizations including our Lohorung Yakhkhama Yuyong (Lohorung Women Organization) also took part in that event. LYY has exhibited food stall and Dhaka cloths at Dasarath Stadium during the event period of three days. That day was the last day of a week long event where many different types of games such as Badminton, Traditional Archery etc were held.
The final day started from a rally at Khulamanch, Ratnapark where many indigenous peoples gathered before setting off. NGO-Federation of Nepalese Indigegnous Nationalities (NGO-FONIN) had been organizing “Singnature Campaign”. Finally about two kilometers long cloth signatured by different people of the Kathmandu valley were asked to carry by the people taking part in that rally. It was really a unique and fun experience for me to help them to ask different people at the roadside for asking to do signature and distributing pamplates.

It was fun to celebrate the gone Dashain. Though not much like the previous one where we had blast. The movement of non-Hindus to avoid celebrating Dashain is growing like wild fire and we are not exception. Many think that it is wired not to celebrate the great festival. But if you look back the history how Dashain festival was implemented to the non-Hindus, it is quite unfair. Every indigenous peoples have their own culture and festivals. Being in power, Hindu celebrated it, gave holidays which is still going on. Soon it became the national festival and everybody forgot their festival and started celebrating it. There is the system that a house should be marked by the blood of animal to signify that they are celebrating the festival. If one don’t follow that they were punished.

Whatever the history it was not fair and that makes the non-Hindus burn from inside and that is dangerous for the society and for the nation. I took this Dashain as LFC ( Leave for Change) from the work or having vacation. We played cards and dice, gone to visit relatives and the mostly played PC games. Actually I took two PC game DVDs cost Rs. 100 each. One was AOEIII (Age of Empires III) and the other was POP(Prince of Persia). AOE is my all time favorite PC game. This AOE III is the new version and there were new missions which I completed in this Dashain. I had bought Geforce FX5500 having 256MB memory from Computer Bazar, Putalisadak with Rs. 4600. Graphic cards are the dream device of all PC gamer and I was too. It took nearly three years to fulfill that dream. But the second DVD POP was damaged and thinking of replacing it.

The most good thing I thought I did in this Dashain is to collect Rs. 200 as the donation for flood victims of Terai. I made the rule that every person who wins the game should put Re. 1 as donation. That process continued and finally it reached that amount and I think that was not bad. I don’t know that was the reason or something else that I won most of the game and collected much more money than I had. We play Kitti, Flash, Kalbirak and Marriage. This Dashain our elder brother Aanand taught how to play Marriage. It was fun to play but at first it spun head to calculate the points last.

As the question of animal slaughter, it has become many years since we left to kill them during such festivals. But half of our family members are non-veg so they bought meat. I was surprised to read an article which said some villages of Gorkha left to kill animal before 100 years. It was successful due to a monk who encouraged the villagers to do so. I think this year there were a lot of movement went against animal slaughter which is very good. If this kind of situation continues there will be good place to live for animals and humans too.