A Celebration for the Holi Festival of Colors, organized by The Association for South Asian Cultural Understanding, exploded this Saturday at Gate 1 of the Corniche. NYUAD students spent the afternoon attacking one another with neon-colored powder along with water, using balloons, guns and buckets. The rainbow eruption was captivating — Students and staff members quickly morphed from sparkly clean to drenched in color from head to toe.

An Indian tradition, the Holi Festival holds more meanings than one. With roots in Hindu mythology and legends, it also welcomes the spring season and nature’s bloom. This South Asian holiday acted as a way to unite NYUAD students from all backgrounds as they played on what freshman Dan Mountcastle called “the multicolored battlefield.”

Freshman Bhavna Menon was excited to participate in a piece of her home culture here at NYUAD.

“It was so great to see people from so many different countries playing in the festival I grew up in,” she said.

Bhavna saw these multicultural faces reach a point of no distinction at the end of the event when the colors had blended so brightly that, as Bhavna described, “all of our faces had no skin color.”

Having helped plan the event for the past two weeks, sophomore Delshad Shroff said that on the day of the event, the organizers were running around getting last minute things together. Another organizer, freshman Abhijai Garg, said getting the water guns, water pistols, water hose, buckets was a challenge.

But Garg felt that their hard work paid off and described the event as amazing.

“When I came back [to Sama Tower] I switched on Facebook and everybody had already put up their pictures, my whole Facebook wall was Holi,” he said.

In addition to helping with organization, Garg took the win in an eating competition of the Indian street food at Holi. Garg, Ornella Halawi, Bobby Haynes, Nandita Chaturvedi and Krishan Mistry ate six pieces of pani puri with spice chutney per round, with eliminations depending on speed. Each round, the pool of contenders got smaller and, in the end, Garg’s rapid pani puri consumption could not be matched.

The aftermath of Holi in the grassy area of Gate 1 proved a manageable mess, consisting mostly of stained grass. The aftermath in Sama Tower, however, will persist for the next week as students attempt to scrub the stains from their skin.

When asked about the large pink splotch still glaring on freshman Devin Quinn’s forehead he said, “‘I took a twenty-minute shower which was primarily spent trying to scrub my face. It doesn’t come off.”

The evidence remains: NYUAD’s epic pigment party exploded all over its participants; the Holi Festival of colors was a success.