Samuel Benoit

My beloved Flickr has just added video functionality so I am posting here the video Naw-Ruz greeting video I was commissioned by the Ottawa holy day celebration master Sherrie Yazdani to make. She asked all Ottawa Baha’is living far and away to send in short greeting videos to be shown all together at the community’s big Naw-Ruz bash. For the cinematography I called in the highly decorated Ph.D of Agronomy and my dear co-worker, Dr. U. K. Shanwad.

UPDATE: Click here to see the video greeting of Marie-Claire Saindon in French Guiana on her blog Before, During, After.

Naw-Ruz is New Years for Baha’is, Persians and Zoroastrians that lands at the end of the Baha’i period of fasting, the first day of spring and near Easter, Holi, Purim and this year Mawlid an-Nabi and unusual rains in Dharwad caused by a low-pressure zone over the Gulf. It would be fair to say that it is the biggest night many Baha’i communities where friends come dressed to the nines, especially those of the Persian persuasion.

Our Naw-Ruz celebration in Dharwad was a much more humble affair. After my friend Kumar Naika had to leave Dharwad for Bangalore for employment, the Baha’i Centre sat locked for several months and my high hopes raised from my first visits there fell.

That there was any affair at all was the result many fasting days of work on the part of my friend Elina and I trying to track down local Baha’is using the vaguest list of humans in all of South India.  Elina turned out to possess my same foolish determination required to find people in India complimented by the ablilty to speak Hindi and we got ourselves into enough dead-ends to remind me of my earlier search for Sureka in places that she wasn’t in.

One afternoon as were on a desperate search for a trace of a Baha’i family listed to be in particular neighborhood, we found a clue in the form of a nine-pointed star motif molded in the concrete of a home. The nine pointed star is often used by Baha’is as a unique symbol for the faith. When we saw a second, then third and fourth home bearing our symbol we realized that it was probably too good to be true. When we saw this house that we found to look like the cover of the Baha’i historical text The Dawn-Breakers, we got freaked out and ran away.

Within a few days of our planned Naw-Ruz celebration Elina and I found the key to the Center and I hired two laborers one day after work from my university to help me clean it out after three months of ashes creeping in from various neighbor’s burned garbage. There was also a degree of archeology to it to learn about Dharwad’s dormant community from the photographs, scraps of paper and unpaid bills that were strewn about the place.

About a dozen of us celebrated Naw-Ruz together at the Center by candlelight, including three Baha’is, three Muslims, three Hindus, three children, the aforementioned acclaimed cinematographer and it was perfect.