 Onam celebration
 Almost 200 final year engineering students dance at the same time. "Taka Taka Tak" is the beat from the drums. Flowers are thrown here and there. A pretty girl in a pink salwar whistles. Not far away from all this, an elephant trumpets.
Joy and jubilation filled the air during the Onam celebrations at the Mar Athanasius College of Engineering in Kothamangalam, about an hour's drive from Kottayam, in Kerala. The festival of Onam symbolises the Indian spirit of Vasudaiva Kutumbakam (universal brotherhood), and you realise it while standing in the midst of 1,000-odd dancing college students in their college campus.
"Every year, this is a day off for us," said Prasanth P S, a final year student of electrical engineering, "We just finished staging a play on King Mahabali. Now, the guy dressed as the king will be taken in a procession."
Also part of the procession are students dressed as tigers (they shake your hand and pass off a generous amount of yellow and black paint) and hunters (who carry a big plastic gun and wield it like an AK-47). Students said nobody could dress up as an elephant and so they decided to get a real one.
The procession and the fun that the students had was an indication that electrical engineering students can be electrifying, computer science students cool and mechanical engineering students
marvellous.
This was the first time I was celebrating Onam, and that too in "God's own country", that it will forever remain a special day for me.
Srinivasa Ramanujam
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