The Elephant Festival

  On Saturday I headed out with a group of girls I met at the Polo Grounds in Jaipur to the "Elephant Festival". We were pretty excited - the program promised a parade, tug of war, and a game of elephant polo. Upon arriving we were shepereded into rows of seats alongside a pavilion looking out over the polo pitch over the low barrier. It was a cloudy day, not too hot, and the grass was clipped underfoot while green deciduous trees ringed the playing area. The whole setting was reminiscent of the cricket pitches out the back of the school I went to in Hertfordshire, so really quite incongruous with being in the middle of the Rajastani desert.

  The crowd was touristy. Baseball caps and swimming shorts, large bumbags, octogenarians, a liberal spread red sun burn. Two upper class sounding Indians from the tourist office simpered about the entertainment in store for us in the curious subcontinental interpretation of RP, their approach to event announcing seemingly inspired by 1950s Pathe newsreels.

  It was all a bit staged to be honest, and had the tepid air of school sports day so I wasn't anticipating much. Thank God for the elephants. As soon as they turned up the crowd went totally bananas, and a mass pitch invasion took place to get pictures of the ridiculously tarted up big mammals.  Ethically dubious as it is to paint a bunch of elephants and march them round a field for the enjoyment of a bunch of wealthy tourists, it does not diminish how awesome they looked as you can see.

  As it turned out the polo never happened which was a shame, the pitch invasion completely derailing the arranged events, but I think I preferred the chaos of it to the intended spoon feeding of culture that seems to imply a lack of independence of thought and deed on the part of bovine westerners.