‘Lo’ means year and ‘sar’ means new.

A new year, a new beginning, a chance to be a new person…Don’t we all wish for a chance to be happy? Losar, like all other New Year festivals , signifies not only a happy event but also one when we can start afresh. It’s not as much about new resolutions as it is about accepting change…impermanence. For many of us it’s also about building a home away from home. After all home is not just about the landscape and the buildings, it’s about the sentiment shared by a community. 

Losar is the New Year festival celebrated in regions where Tibetan Buddhism continues to be practised. It is calculated as per the Tibetan lunar calendar and this year it falls on the 24^th, 25^thand 26^thof February; also marking this year as the year of the Rat (zodiac sign). However, different regions and their specific valleys celebrate this festival at different dates according to the specific variations in the regional sub-calendars. Although the main tenets of the festival remain intact across regions, each community’s way of celebration is marked by regional peculiarities. 

The three of us belong to three of the many different regions : Lahaul, Spiti, and Ladakh. Each of us represent a part of a history that has assumed different narratives.

 

Homecoming

Belonging to two ethnic communities was like landing at two diverged paths at every level of my journey till now. As a child living in a place other than my own, my mixed appearance would always shelter me from some remarks, at the same time my name and my place of origin would make me stand conflicted as an individual with sort of dual identities to perform. Maybe it was the air and the people that remained as the reason why I always kept myself informed about my land and heritage. But as people say experiences mattered and those were yet to be formed. 

Knowing more about the festivals, folk dance and folklore from the land was like discovering a part of myself.  However the only source of my knowledge were the annual regional gatherings and occasional visits to my family friend’s place. 

The first time I heard about Losar was, strangely, through my sister’s experience in her college hostel. It was the name ‘Tenzin’ which made the Tibetan Buddhists of her college call her to celebrate the festival. I still remember the details or at least how I imagined and chose to keep it in my memory: one of the hostel trunks wrapped in a beautiful cloth, on top of which the food items such as momos, thukpa and one more local dish were kept. After singing and chanting the prayers, they all gathered and shared the food items. 

She had discovered a new offshoot of her culture and strangely so had I.

My first actual experience came exactly a year after, with my family friends in The City Beautiful. It was the first time when we all came together after a long time to celebrate something that was distant yet close to our inner selves. The event unfolded as I had imagined except that the local dish had the name ‘dusha’; and my tastebuds took to this new dish instantaneously, almost as if it wasn’t new…

That day remains close to my heart because that was the first time I encountered a sense of belongingness. That was my first and the only Losar that I ever celebrated with my family. Those moments remain magical till this day. 

-Sonam Chhomo

My community, my family

Losar, our New year, is celebrated quite differently from the way New Year is celebrated elsewhere. I grew up in Spiti and have always celebrated Losar with my whole village.

The whole village would come together and make really tasty snacks such as sheto or sweet puri. The whole day would be spent in making sheto for the entire village. A group of young people would then go from one house to another to distribute Sheto, along with a small token of love for the elderly people. I would await the Sheto distributers arrival with great anticipation. I still remember how slowly the hours would pass before the arrival of the Sheto distributers and how ecstatic I became on their arrival. One of the lovely customs was to prepare songs that were dedicated to the Sheto distributers. The entire day’s program would also be recorded with a camera to encapsulate this celebration and relive the memories later. Everything would be recorded, right from what each family was doing to the various kinds of performances. The following day the entire program would be aired on the cable channel.

Now that I’ve come away from home, I realize how precious those moments were. My neighbours and the Sheto distributers were not just following a tradition; they were dancing to the tune of their hearts.  

For me Losar is about bonding, sharing memories and of course lots of laughter not just with my family but also with the whole community. Despite the dawn of the age of individualism, my culture continues to revolve around the beauty of community living.

-Nawang Chhoetso

Embracing change

 I’ve never really had a taste of Losar in its authentic sense for I’m usually not in Ladakh on the occasion. Since it falls in the winter, many families are usually away during Losar due to the harsh climatic conditions. However, it’s something that I always look forward to; something that always takes me back home no matter where I am. Losar is preceded by many days of pre-celebration. 

My favourite event is the dinner served on Ghuthuk. We usually have thukpa (noodle soup) and other dishes; but the food is the least important part of the meal. What makes this meal special is that it comes with a prophecy, well, almost. The ‘prediction’ varies every year; you may be predicted to be kind-hearted, relatively unkind, gossipy, knowledgeable and so on. 

Such ‘predictions’ are derived out of a customary practice which entails placing symbolic representations of the aforementioned qualities inside rolls of wet dough. These rolls are then jumbled in a bowl and presented to the members of the household. Each one opens their roll to reveal the symbol that they have received for the coming year. For instance, if one opens the roll to find a piece of newspaper, it symbolises knowledge and wisdom in the coming year. 

Here is a chart of few of the symbols and the associated qualities:

Symbol	Meaning
Cotton (bal)	kind-heartedness
Salt (tsa)	gossipy, petty
White conch shell (dungkar)	one who will spread dharma, or in the modern context, knowledge
Newspaper	wisdom and knowledge

Of course, it is only a custom and is taken in good humour. The aim is not to really ‘predict’ your coming year; I see it as a custom that perhaps seeks to make one ponder over a dominating good quality that you must embrace or a bad quality that you must let go of. Hence, it initiates a process of introspection; irrespective of the validity of the prediction, you give a thought to how you can become a better person in the coming year. Hence, it’s more about understanding the underlying message of the custom than its outcome. Moreover, the inclusion of good as well as bad qualities in the rolls, symbolises the need to accept the good and the bad and to understand how the binaries need not be translated dualistically. Once we remove the imposition of duality, it becomes easier to find inner peace.

The symbol I received this year is particularly special because it somehow resonates with the tempo of my year so far and hopefully, I can take it forward.

                                                                                                                    -Rinchen Angmo

Just as the sentiment of the festival continues to bring many together, it brought the three of us together too, despite our individual differences. Perhaps it was the sheer joy of being able to talk without having to give an explanation about our cultural context. Being able to identify culturally within the ambit of a common educational space in itself was a novelty. Hence, we thought it might be a nice idea to begin this year by sharing something old yet unheard of by many.