The recent “Ratkha Yatra” holiday was definitely a colorful and attractive show. There were girls, dressed up in sari, lots of flags and flowers and a number of some odd violations of religious ethics.
On the August, 29 and 30 the Indian “Ratkha Yatra” festival was held on Festival Berth in Dnepropetrovsk. It mostly looked very peaceful and decent, but it caused indeed a number of questions without any answer.
The first thing that made me feel troubled was the advertisement of the festival, posted on improper places and hence, illegal. The second thing that disturbed me was the endless “Hare Krishna Hare Rama” mantra. I have been walking around near a group of people having fun there for half an hour and they went on and on repeating these four words. I asked Svetlana Pavlovna, the doctor who was in the first aid brigade there to tell me what it was. She answered: “It’s a typical trance state”. I felt it was a promising beginning of the festival. A bit later the things got even worse. The boy, who was sitting in a chariot, all covered with flowers, started throwing cakes into the crowd. A kind of a crush occurred. People started catching the cakes as if they were starving. As there were plenty cakes in the chariot, and the boy kept throwing, one of them fell nearly into my hands. To be more exact, it hit me on my head. I looked at a lump of chocolate, covered with pieces of coconut and packed into a plastic bag. I failed to find out the manufacturer and the expiry date of this heaven gift.
But it was not the quality that made me even more confused. I found out that these cakes were not just sweet goods, but a ritual food, prasada. If you eat it, you worship Krishna. Christian commandments don’t let this. And the guests were not informed of it, which is a kind of a fraud.
Distributing religious books also looked strange. You were told that you looked very nice and that you seemed to be a very intelligent person and then they proposed to take the book as a present. If you agreed and took the book, they used to insist that you should make a donation for charity. This is an evident scene of psychological violation – you have accepted the present and giving it back is impolite.
During an hour and a half I noticed lots of strange and fishy things. And telling people nothing about religious and ritual kind of the festival makes one even more anxious. They make one think that those, who ride a bright chariot have something to hide...

Xenia Chubuk                                                                                                                                                   (o 11)