Bhubaneswar: With an aim to encourage the citizens to celebrate the festival of colours in an eco-friendly way, Unmukt Art conducted ‘Green Holi – Make your own colours’ event here Sunday.
Most of the colours are just industrial dyes that are available cheaply but cause great harm to our skin and sometimes cause more enduring harm as well.
Artificial chemicals like lead oxide, bromide, silica and asbestos to name the few which are highly toxic and carcinogenic can lead to problems ranging from mild skin and eye irritation to severe problems like renal damage, dermatitis, bronchial asthma, various forms of cancer and many more diseases.
Not only they cause damage to our bodies but also they raise serious environmental concerns.
Moreover, most of the available alternatives are expensive and somehow not without their own side effects and often not completely bio degradable too.
The best alternative according to Shweta Agarwal, founder of Unmukt Foundation, is to create your own colours from ingredients easily available around us. It may be mentioned here that the foundation is working on this initiative to revive and spread the age-old knowledge and encouraging people to make colours easily and play green Holi happily.
Brihmayamayi Rath, a teacher, explained that Holi comes after the winters so in earlier times people did not take bath regularly due to cold and bathed only after Holi which helped them to get rid of skin diseases.
Ansuman Agarwal from Cuttack expressed his thanks to Shweta and said the event was really wonderful. “I was so engaged in the art that the two-three hours went by like minutes,” he added.
Caption
Green Holi
A participant mixes ingredients to make natural colour