The wind waving over the south Campanile lawn picked up the different colors thrown in the air by the participants of the Holi festival April 19.

A crowd of 150 people gathered under the bright sun to celebrate the Indian tradition. This was the fifth time the Indian Students Association set up the event which mainly involved drenching each other in colored powder and water.

The ISU ChakRaas club started the celebration with their performance of a traditional Indian dance with sticks.

The Bollywood music carried across Central Campus and Vivek Lawana, graduate student in biomedical sciences and president of the Indian Students Association, passed out the first bags of powder to the waiting people. The students were coated in colors in a matter of minutes. Their originally white shirts colored in bright orange, neon green, deep purple, pink or yellow.

“It is a lot of fun,” Lawana said.”How happy you are when someone pours color on you and you pour color on somebody else?”

Students walked through the crowd, carrying powder in their hands and painting friends and strangers faces alike while wishing them Happy Holi.

“I love Holi,” said Sweta Roy, graduate student in genetics development and cell biology and international student from India. “You mix with everybody. You meet strangers and play with them like you play with your friends.”

As the Bollywood music continued, many participants began to dance until a performance of the day by the ISU Bollywood club. The students performed while colored form head to toe.

“Holi Festival is a major event for us,” said Akshi Mohla, dance choreographer of the ISU Bollywood club and an undeclared distance education graduate from India. “It is a festival of colors. We celebrate the arrival of spring.”

As the sun continued to burn down into the sky, the water guns and hose were used increasingly so that the crowd was not only brightly painted but also soaked in water.

Friends even went so far as to drop each other into large buckets of water that where spread out over the lawn. Many didn’t mind going by the traditional saying “Don’t mind, its Holi.”

“This saying means that you just go out and celebrate Holi. You don’t think about your problems or worries. You just have fun,” Lawana said.

Carolyn Heising, professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering described the festival as wild chaos. She had been invited by Indian students in her classes to attend the festival and so she came out on campus to watch it unfold.

The event organizers brought out white banners for everybody to sign and print their handprints on as well as pizza for the participants to eat.

“I am very happy about the outcome,” Lawana said. ” I especially liked that the crowd was more international. At least 50 people were non-Indians.”