Kooli

As part of the annual day celebrations my students of Palavaka had decided to do a particular art show. The theme of the same was Halloween. But we were doing our own version of that. If Halloween comes during the end of October in the western countries we thought our celebration of ghosts comes during the month of March/April. Since Halloween is in connection with the autumn equinox we believed we could do the same with the spring equinox. There was a reason too why it was decided like that.

In Kerala the spring equinox is the time when it is believed that the local ghosts are free for a certain time span of days. This we applied in this celebration. As the preparations went on our whole campus was full of ghostly props. The children were all in costumes and there were performances too. We performed 3 poems of Malayalam poet Balachandran Chullikkadu in connection with this.

The lighting was the best thing about the celebration. The function started during the day time and stretched into the night so that the twilight was highlighted. Children made their costumes, the props and things out of waste materials. They made a lot of masks, sculptures and huge props. During the festival not only western ghosts but ghosts from around the world could be seen in our campus. The function was a roaring success.