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Saturday, January 13, 2018

Bhogi

While we were young Bhogi used to be more special than Pongal. The preparation for Bhogi starts few days earlier in terms of buying the best drum. Especially the Saidapet market area used to have so many varieties in drums right from the original "clay skin drum" to latest plastic ones.

Once you buy the clay skin drum the next job is to have a proper drum beating stick. It will be mostly a stick from broomstick with a ball of tar placed at the top. We used to search for tar melt it and them put it as a cap at the end of the stick. With the right size your drum will generate great noise.

Will the drum in hand we will be running around making a hell of noise.

Then comes the actual burning and heating your drum over the roaring fire and tuning it is a pleasant experience.

As we grew it became more about staying awake the entire night for Bhogi but getting permission from parents was difficult owing to the weather. Still we used to stay awake late and get up early. The thicker the fog the more happy we were. There were times when we had used "thennai olai" as material for compound wall and during Bhogi people will take away those things.

Looking at the fog outside I feel the burning factor of Bhogi remains the same but whether this generation kids will get to see the Bhogi we did remains a question.

The Dhalapathy song made Bhogi even more attractive.

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