Indian diaspora brings Oslo Colour Festival to Norway

With the Norwegian spring’s sunny weather and light breezes kicking in, the Holi colour festival was hosted at Vallhall Arena on May the 7th. Holi is celebrated all across India in myriad ways. Holi represents joy, understanding and unity and is a culmination of fun, happiness, and colours. 

Oslo Colour Festival, hosted at Vallhall Arena, was filled with around 2500 people and a ton of energetic performers from all the states of India. The festival had everything, you name it; dance, song, music, and the infamous, mouthwatering food of India. Performance after performance rocked the hall and there was laughter and joy throughout the entire stadium. This was all thanks to a hard-working team of over 500 volunteers and 15 different committees. 

India’s many languages, clothing styles, cuisine, art forms and cultural diversity is akin to colours. Every single Indian shares a common understanding of how important colours are and how much they mean to us, unity among the Indian diaspora is an integral part of being an Indian. This event showed just how rich and diverse India is, embracing all world religions, languages and cultures. 

This was the perspective of someone in the audience. Now, I’d like to talk about how it was on stage and the preparation before that. Being on stage in front of 2500 people was a surreal experience, and it felt amazing to perform in front of so many people. The satisfaction when the audience starts singing and clapping along with your performance is immense. However, the final product required hours and hours of work beforehand from everyone who performed. 

The preparation for the performance started approximately 2 months prior to the actual day. I participated in both the musical performances; the inaugural performance and the Tamilnadu performance. Both these performances required weekly practices, and lots of practice at home. There were 10+ dedicated performers for both performances who put in a lot of work for it to sound as amazing as it did. 

For the inaugural performance, there was a combination of carnatic, Bollywood, and modern Indian songs. This showed the vast repository of music that is Indian music. Jai Ho was the hit of the performance, with the crowd erupting in song. For the Tamilnadu performance, two hit Tamil songs were played: Tamizha Tamizha and Vellai Pookal. The first song is a song about unity and how all Indians are one. This was a great performance starter with strong, upbeat string sections and a powerful melody. The second song was more mellow, and a nice song to end the performance with. 

Playing Holi outside the arena was a blast and having around a 1000 people outside made it even better. 

All in all, it was a fantastic day with tons of great performances and a great Holi festival outside to finish the day up. I enjoyed myself a lot, and I hope you did too! Please hold the date and join us next year for even bigger and better festivities on May 6th 2023!