Among the festivals of India, Holi is the only festival which celebrates love and harmony, friendship and brotherhood with various colors. The celebration of Holi is a common thread of unity in the socio-cultural diversity of India. The festival of colors is celebrated in different ways but with equal enthusiasm across the country, which will leave you surprised. Somewhere it is traditional, while somewhere it is trendy. Somewhere it is a color chaos, while somewhere it is a colorful extravaganza. Somewhere Holi is a genuine celebration of age-old folk cultures, whereas somewhere it is a sinful frenzy of urbanites. You can soak in flamboyance of colors, no matter which part of India you visit this time.

We at Indian Eagle handpicked five places from across India and explored what makes them the best destinations for fun-filled, spectacular Holi celebrations.

Shantiniketan

Holi is a cultural festival celebrated with an aura of sophistication in Rabindranath Tagore’s Shantiniketan, an international seat of learning and literature in Bengal. Though Holi is known as Dol Yatra all over the state, the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore introduced it as Vasanta Utsav attributing a cultural dimension to it. Dressed in shades of yellow, orange and green, boys and girls choreograph the celebration in rhythmic fashions – singing and dancing. In Shantiniketan, the atmosphere of the day is a miasma of colorfulness and literary fervor as the students of Vishva Bharati University celebrate the festival through the poems and songs, composed by the Bard of Bengal himself.

Shantiniketan, which is also famous for its age-old Pous Mela, is a nearly 4-hour train journey or road trip from Kolkata. Know how to save big on flights to Kolkata, India.  

Delhi

In Delhi, the cosmopolitan ways of Holi celebration are unique to the capital’s multicultural milieu. Holi celebration is not less musical and crazy than a DJ party with foot-tapping numbers from Bollywood movies. The Delhites who are Page 3 celebrities throw parties in resorts and farm houses. The temperature of the atmosphere soars so high that they cool off themselves with sips of bhang lassi and thandai. Delhi is also famous for the Holi Cow Festival, an organized event of music and madness. Do watch the video of the song, “Balam pitchkari jo tune mujhe mari” from the music album of the movie Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani to get a hang of how madly Delhites celebrate the festival of colors.

Delhi has global air connectivity. Especially, Air India operates several nonstop flights to Delhi IGI Airport from USA, UK and other parts of the world.  

Ahmedabad

Ahmedabad is the best place to celebrate this spring festival in Gujarat. Be the festival Holi or Navratri, Gujarati celebrates it traditionally. Holi is a cultural extravaganza in the capital of Gujarat. The celebration begins with the breaking of earthen pots of buttermilk hung from a rope in the streets after the joyous procession of menfolk through lanes and alleys comes to an end. This ceremony is observed in honor of Lord Krishna who used to steal the pots of butter and buttermilk from Gopis’ houses. In some parts of the city, Gujarati belles wearing ghagra with mirror work and the men wearing colorful turbans play dandiya to spread euphoria all around. Haryana celebrates Holi in the same fashion.

Ahmedabad, India’s first UNESCO World heritage city is well-connected with the rest of India. Cheap airfare deals for flights to Ahmedabad from USA will leave you amazed. 

Mathura & Vrindavan

Mathura and Vrindavan are the best places to celebrate Holi in North India. These two destinations for pilgrims and tourists are mythically associated with the legends of Krishnaleela or Rasleela. It is said that the zest the Brajwasis (people of Vrindavan) play Holi with is not felt in the rest of India during the festival. Their festive spirit is so high that the celebration begins 40 days prior to the day of Holi. Boys are dressed like Krishna, and girls dress themselves like Gopis (female admirers of Krishna). The Lathmar Holi of Barsana, the village of Sri Radha, is the main attraction. The boys of Vrindavan play colors with the girls of Barsana in a flirtatious manner. They drench each other with colored water and sprinkle gulal in the air.

You can reach Mathura and Vrindavan by road from New Delhi Airport in nearly 3 hours. Check the interesting facts of the world’s tallest temple, Vrindavan Chandrodaya Mandir which is currently under construction in Mathura for a whopping cost of INR 700 crores (USD 102 million).  

Manipur

The way Manipur celebrates the Holi Festival is culturally unique, Northeast India. The festivity begins on the Full Moon day of Phalguna and spans for six days. The age-old Yaosang Festival of the state was merged with Holi celebration during the rise of Vaishnavism. The tradition of celebrating Holi through cultural performances including folk dance forms and songs has been replaced with the trend – music band culture. Setting fire to a thatched hut of hay and twigs marks the beginning of the festivity. The boys and girls play gulal, the following day. The sight of devotees wearing white & yellow turbans, dancing in front of the Krishna temple and offering gulal to the obedience of the Lord is a wonderful spectacle to witness. The celebration ends with a religious procession to the capital city, Imphal.

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India is pulling out all the stops to tap into the global tourism market for a decent pie, while 20-year-old Manushi Chhillar from Haryana turned the global attention to India by winning the ‘Miss World 2017’ title. Manushi is the sixth Indian to have won the Miss World pageant after 16 years of India’s hibernation from the year 2000 when actress Priyanka Chopra won the most coveted crown.

More and more girls from the Indian state of Haryana are coming out of the shell to make it big for the nation and themselves. With Manushi Chhillar having brought home the prestigious ‘Miss World 2017’ title, the success of Haryana girls including the Phogat sisters in wresting, continues. We at Indian Eagle hope that Manushi’s achievement will ignite sparks of empowerment in many girls, who re still groping in the dark or struggling under a veil, across the country.

A medical student at Bhagat Phool Singh Government Medical College for Women in Haryana, the Miss World 2017 winner is a trained classical dancer in Kuchipudi. She aims to be a cardiac surgeon. Opening hospitals for free treatment in rural backwaters of India is one of the plans on her agenda for the country. Manushi Chhillar is an outdoor sports enthusiast too. She has a penchant for scuba diving, bungee jumping and snorkeling.

Manushi Chhillar’s winning the ‘Miss World 2017’ title has been a journey starting with her participation and success in the Femina Miss India 2017 competition sponsored by Colors and FBB India. While a semifinalist in several categories of the Miss World 2017 pageant, she was a co-winner of the Beauty with a Purpose competition.

Also Check: Indian American Teen Empowers Rural Women in Rajasthan  

Part of the Beauty with a Purpose competition, Project Shakti saw the best of Manushi Chhillar as a social activist. She visited 20 villages and educated over 5000 women on menstrual hygiene in compliance with the goals of Project Shakti, an imitative for rural women’s financial empowerment and livelihood. She found the Project Shakti close to her heart, and felt honored to make a difference to the way those rural women used to treat menstrual issues.

A gifted poet and painter, Manushi Chhillar proved to be a beauty with brains in the final round of the Miss World 2017 pageant when she was asked, “Which profession deserves the highest salary and why?” In a split second, she answered that mother should get respect and the highest salary.

Haryana, which is infamous for crimes against women, has produced many brave girls who beat all odds to break household bounds and take up male-dominated pursuits like wresting. Sakshi Malik, a 2016 Rio Olympic winner; Mamta Kharab, the Arjuna Award-winning ‘golden girl’ of Indian Hockey; Saina Nehwal having 21 international badminton titles; Santosh Yadav, the world’s first woman to have climbed Mt. Everest twice, and Zohrabai Ambalewali, a leading playback singer in the early eras of Bollywood are among the women legends of Haryana.

Indian American astronaut Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian woman on a space mission in 1977, and India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj are also from Haryana.

Indian girls are winning such pageants with their beauty and brains not only at home but also abroad. Recently, two Indian American girls – Saanvi Sreejit from Texas and Himanvi Panidepu from Virginia – got featured in the Young Indian section of Travel Beats, Indian Eagle’s leading community portal for Indians in the USA. 13-year-old Saanvi Sreejit represented Texas in the National America Miss 2017, and 17-year-old Himanvi Panidepu won the Miss Virginia Teen USA 2018 title.

We at Indian Eagle congratulate Manushi Chhillar on glorifying India and bringing honor to Indians worldwide with her ‘Miss World 2017’ title. It is part of our continued effort to promote achievements of young Indians and make travel to India cheaper than ever.

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37-year-old lawyer Birender Sangwan is at the helm of a major recent change in India’s $100 billion healthcare industry for the sake of millions of people who couldn’t afford cardiovascular surgery due to exorbitantly high prices of coronary stent, a metal or plastic tube inserted into the body through a small puncture in a leg or arm to open up blocked arteries and restore normal blood flow to the heart. India’s $531 million coronary stent industry used to inflate through rampant profiteering by selling stents at unchecked prices with margins up to 654% before lawyer Birender Sangwan initiated a crusade against it.

All thanks to lawyer Birender Sangwan for having moved the government of India to crack the whip on private hospitals which charged cardiovascular patients over INR 1 lakh for a single stent! The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority of India cut the price of stent by nearly 85% and capped it at INR 30,000. Furthermore, coronary stent has been included in the National List of Essential Medicines.

This groundbreaking reform was more than a necessity in the healthcare industry of the world’s 7^th largest and Asia’s 3^rd largest economy where 30 million people are affected by cardiovascular ailments and over 2 million people die of heart attacks as well as strokes every year.

Source: ScoopWhoop

In 2015, lawyer Birender Sangwan from Haryana filed a public interest litigation (PIL) in the High Court of Delhi, seeking the government’s intervention in the coronary stent industry which was thriving by overcharging common people for a life-saving device. But, he set out on this mission earlier than the litigation was filed when a private hospital charged his friend INR 126,000 for a coronary stent to save the life of his friend’s brother in 2014. On seeing no maximum retail price of the device on its box, Birender asked the hospital for the purchase bill; but it was refused.

On digging deeper into the market, Birender Sangwan came to know to his surprise that stents were priced at high margins from distribution to supply due to lack of governmental regulation, and that this life-saving device was not on the National List of Essential Medicines. It led him to launch the crusade which was obviously not a roller-coaster ride.

The first step he took was lodging a query under the Right to Information Act to check how many hospitals in Delhi performed angioplasty. Then he checked with the hospitals if the price of stent they charged was same, and found that the pricing of the device varied from one hospital to the other. One month later or so, he filed a complaint against those hospitals with the health ministry of India.

On filing another RTI query in November 2014, lawyer Birender Sangwan got to know from the Indian government that stent was covered under the Drug and Cosmetic Act, but it was not included in the National List of Essential Medicines. This list includes those medicines which must be affordable for the citizens of India. In February 2015, he filed a PIL at the High Court of Delhi to get stent covered in NLEM, but the litigation was not responded to for months.

In October 2015, he reached the High Court with a contempt notice for the government’s negligence of his PIL to include stent in NLEM. In July 2016, the National List of Essential Medicines included stent. He did stop here. He sought a cap on the maximum retail price of stents through another PIL in December 2016.

On February 13, 2017, his sincere efforts were rewarded with a verdict in favor of millions of people when the Delhi High Court issued a directive for the government mandating it to cap the MRP of bare metal stents at INR 7,260 and the MRP of modern drug eluting stents at INR 29,600.

Born in a middle class family in the Indian state of Haryana, Birender Sangwan spent two years on preparing for medical entrance examinations because his parents wanted him to be a doctor. But medial study was not his cup of tea. He still gets faint at the sight of blood and feels dizzy at the typical odor of medicine in the air of hospitals. He graduated in political science at Delhi University and studied law at Maharishi Dayanand University in Haryana.

Lawyer Birender Sangwan’s crusade against such malpractices in the healthcare industry of India is not over yet. It will continue to make other overly priced medical devices including orthopedic implants affordable for millions of common people in India.

Travel Beats by Indian Eagle is a digital publication for Indian Diaspora to keep up with news and stories of India. Subscribe to Travel Beats’ free newsletter and receive exclusive stories to your email inbox.

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“To know thyself is the greatest discovery of all.” There are several different ways to connect with yourself, discover your identity and feel your existence. Travel is one of them. An unplanned travel across vast expanse of sands, lush green landscapes, running brooks, rolling valleys, and imposing hills towards an unknown destination is full of epiphany and euphoria. The theme of travel, self-discovery and soulfulness is the story of Highway directed by Imtiaz Ali.

Highway is the cinematic story of a road trip through the six states of India – Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Himachal Pradesh and Kashmir. The physical journey undertaken by a girl along with her kidnapper is a journey from confinement to freedom, from silence to eloquence, from hibernation to awareness, from ignorance to knowledge, from ugliness to beauty, and from darkness to light.

The unexpected and unplanned journey on the highways of the north and northeast states of the country introduces the girl to an unseen, outer world. The journey is physically outbound and mentally inbound. During the travel, she hears the call of the mountains, feels the mild blow of the wind, wonders at the infinity of the desert, catches an eyeful of the sky, speaks to the floating clouds, gazes at the twinkling stars, hums the song of the glacial stream, and realizes that she does exist.

The desolation of desert in Rajasthan depicts her deep-rooted feelings of emptiness and loneliness, while the wind blowing over green fields fills her with eloquence and emotional sprightliness. In contrast to these, she finds the peace of mind in the calm ambience of Aru Valley in Kashmir where she feels empowered and confident amidst snow-clad, majestic mountains.

The journey begins from the highway of urban Delhi and ends at a never-never land in Kashmir. It paces through the aridity of Rajasthan, the roughness of Haryana and the greenery of Punjab. Breathing in the air of freedom, the protagonist feels refreshed and relaxed. She evolves into an empowered woman with an overwhelming sense of individuality and a strong voice of protest. Travel makes her feel one with the beauty, power and soul of nature.

Travel not only enriches and empowers the girl but also makes his kidnapper feel human within. While journeying together the girl and her kidnapper, who are from absolutely different backgrounds, develop an indefinable relationship, the bond of feelings and empathy for each other. She not only enjoys the bliss of nature herself but makes him live the moments of joy with her as well. In her company, the kidnapper unmasks himself from mercilessness and discovers his hidden human self.

Imtiaz Ali’s Highway takes the travelers, who are in search of self-identity, individuality, freedom and aims in life, on a ride which most of us wish to never end. The frames of the movie capture the beauty of the six Indian states in different shades, different moods, in different emotions and different hues. It celebrates the transforming, edifying and enlightening power of travel which shows us the passage to our souls through the beating heart of nature.

IndianEagle.com keeps the promise to make your travel to India a wonderful story by booking the cheapest flight for you!

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After two years of the pandemic, the Surajkund Art and Craft Fair is back with a greater merchandise of rural artisans from across the country. A meeting point for the preservers of India’s dying handicraft culture and their admirers, the fair started on March 19 and will continue till April 4 this year. Faridabad in Delhi NCR, where this handicraft cultural extravaganza is held every year, is a short drive from Indira Gandhi International Airport. Since its inception in 1987, the festival has been organized to celebrate Indian art and artistry by the Union Ministries of Tourism, Textiles, Culture, External Affairs, and the Government of Haryana.

Handicraft has been the apex of rural economy in India for ages. Archaeological evidences from excavations at the sites of Indus Valley Civilization bear out to the opulence as well as diversity of Indian art and craft traditions which seem to be eclipsed by the glare of westernization sweeping across the metropolises. The Surajkund Craft fair is one of the noble initiatives to keep the county’s age-old handicraft culture alive and provide the rural artisans with means of sustenance.

Celebration of diversity and ethnicity

What you can take fancy to in the fair is everything from home décor items to performing arts to ethnically diverse cuisines. The colors of handlooms, earthen pots, effigies, and other merchandise; the warm flavors of regional cuisines, the beats of rural music and the rhythms of dancing feet make a kaleidoscopic feast of joy for the mind, the eyes and the tongues. The festivity brims with a rustic feel of folk dance and music.

Different flavors for different taste buds

Surajkund Art & Craft fair caters to the different taste of visitors from every walk of life. If you are a fashion designer, you will be overwhelmed by an amazing collection of flamboyantly colored handmade fabrics. If you are an interior designer, you can’t help taking fancy to brilliant art pieces of stone, wood, bronze, brass, terracotta and ivory. The ethnic beauty of the handicraft merchandise steals the show with foreigners too.

Meeting point of artisans & art connoisseurs

At the fairground, there is an open-air theater, Natyashala where dancers, musicians and magicians perform their respective talents to entertain visitors. Folk dancers and musicians from the culturally diverse demography of the country make the fair a gala. The Surajkund Craft fair is a meeting point for artisans including painters, sculptors, weavers, potters, and art connoisseurs who drink to the joy of life through culture.

Some highlights of Surajkund Mela 2014

Goa is the theme of Surajkund Art & Craft Fair 2014. Being a popular beach destination, Goa has been selected as the theme of the festival in order to fetch the youth and cultivate their interest in Indian culture. With nations from other continents participating in the fair for last few years, it has become an international event. As many as 20 foreign countries globalized the Surajkund Mela 2013. The participation of all the SAARC nations is the most glittering highlight of the Surajkund Mela 2014. Sri Lanka has partnered with India for the fair this year.

Surajkund at Faridabad in Haryana is accessible via roadways and railways from New Delhi International Airport. Keep in touch with Indian Eagle for such interesting updates and the lowest airfare to India.

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