I am Daarji

                                         Lohri the multifaceted festival,   is celebrated every year on 13th of January and invariably the time is such that we are caught in the midst of a bone-chilling and cold misty winter. Lohri, I often laughingly talk about it as a festival of defrosting. We could say it is a festival of seasons. The history of Lohri, over a period of time, has become quite hybridized that the root and its transition in time are latticed intricately with seasons, element and folklore. The concept is probably as old as that of Indus Valley civilization and Vedic times itself. I In Punjab, the festival of   Lohri marks   the coming of the end of winter or we could say the coming of spring and the New Year. The bonfires are lit at night and in its warmth, people come together singing lilting folk songs and h...

Ahh!! . . . here we are. January 1st, 2012…... A brand new month……. A brand new year. January, the month of new beginnings and is a time to cherish memories. It is the month in which winter weaves her magically festive spell about us with it's cool and crisp days.  This is the month where the temperatures plummet and we gladly look forward to log bonfires and with thick wisps of fog descending around us. And then the  New Year descends on us. Happy New Year! That is the greeting that we will often hear for the first few weeks of 2012. But do you know that January 1st was not always celebrated as New Year's Day? In the earliest times, the celebration of the New Year was one of the oldest recorded holidays.  It was first observed in ancient Babylon about 4000 years ago. Babylon In the years around 2000 BC, the Babylonian New Year began with the first  New  Moon …..That is the first visible crescent after the Vern...