PUSHKAR: World’s Largest Cattle Fair

   

Article By: Shilpi Shukla
Photos By: Lovejeet Alexander

Every November, in the pond-sized sleepy town of Pushkar, India comes alive with a riot of colors and a frenzied burst of activity, attracting visitors from around the globe to the famous Camel Fair. (The complete article was featured in Little India, a US publication...)

Renowned for hosting the world’s largest camel fair, the quiet town of Pushkar exhibits a rare and fascinating combination of religious fervor and cultural effervescence every November. Around 50,000 camels are sold, decorated, shaved and raced during the Pushkar Fair, the largest cattle fair in the world.  Thefestival is quite a hit among foreign tourists. This year’s whopping 200,000 crowd inundated Pushkar’s 14,000 population. The profusion of colors that run riot in the desert sand, the glee and the contagious enthusiasm of the village folk charm every visitor. “Very few fairs in the world, if at all any, can match the liveliness of the Pushkar fair — the world’s largest cattle fair,” said Jamie Jay, a tourist from California, who has been attending the fair regularly for the last four years.  The ambience evoked during the seven-day festival is that of rustic Rajasthan, more so of rural India — vibrant, colorful and quintessentially Indian. Bards and poets recite and sing tales of valor and heroism of bygone days. Singers and dancers stage folk performances throughout the day. Various competitions, such as turban tying, tilak, water pot race, mandna, langari taang, Indian bride, moustache, and wrestling, etc., enliven the event.  “I like the turban tying and tilak competition. They are so Indian,” said Daniel Schwenegger, a tourist from Denmark.  In addition, many animal competitions, such as camel decoration, camel dance, horse dance, fast milking, gir and cross-breed and champion cattle contests delight visitors. “The lumbering beast of burden, the camel all decorated in finery, imagines itself to be an ostrich, and rushes through the race like one. It’s such fun. I have never seen anything like this before,” said Australian college student, Diana Wheat.  Visitors are particularly enamored by the musical chairs competition. “As the music stops, the beautifully decorated camel is supposed to manage to stick its long arching neck between two poles, each camel owner guiding its entrant by means of a silken cord attached to its nose ring. This is really interesting,” said Mac Matusow, a 10-year-old boy from Denmark. (To read the complete article, visit the site of Little India, a US publication...)

Reverse Take

Returning to the villages in India visited by US. presidents after the camera lights have turned off and the make-up washed away. Cover Story for the magazine - Little India - the largest circulated Indian publication in the United States, as well as the largest circulated overseas Indian publication in the world. Like three of the five previous U.S. presidents to visit India before him, Pres. Barack Obama took the customary pilgrimage to an Indian village. Unlike his predecessors, however, he did not actually set foot in one. Instead, in a tip of the hat to India’s vaunted high tech sector, he visited with the residents of Kanpura — a non-descript village, 40 kms. from Ajmer in Rajasthan — via a video link from Mumbai. The video conference purportedly allowed Obama to observe firsthand the IT revolution powering grassroots democracy in rural India at the gram panchayat level, the smallest unit of democratically elected bodies in India. Obama was suitably impressed by “this terrific experiment in democracy,” raving: “One of the incredible benefits of the technology we’re seeing right here is that in many ways India may be in a position to leapfrog some of the intermediate stages of government service delivery, avoiding some of the 20th century mechanisms for delivering services and going straight to the 21st.” Unbeknownst to Obama, the real efficiency of the hi tech experiment — possibly the most important one for Indian officials — lay in the fact that it prevented real life village conditions from intruding upon the shining and spectacular, ready-for-business India on display for the world’s preeminent visitor and his accompanying international media entourage. Far from the range of prying foreign cameras, the marvelous technological efficiency of the video conference masked the lack of the very transparency and accountability that the U.S. president was at that moment extolling. For this investigation, Little India reporters fanned out to the villages blessed with U.S. presidential visits during the past half century to report on what happens after the camera lights have been turned off and the cosmetics and make-up washed away.......