NEW YORK, USA, April 14, 2002: When Mickey Sankar immigrated to the United States six years ago, he brought along happy memories of Holi, the Hindu New Year. “For the whole week, we played,” Sankar, 24, of Ozone Park, recalls of the celebrations in his hometown on Guyana’s Caribbean coast. “We went to every house. We had a nice time with our jars of paint.” Now his spiritual home is the Shri Lakshmi Narayan Mandir, a small Hindu temple on commercial Liberty Avenue in Richmond Hill. This year, Sankar and his twin brother, Ricky, enjoyed Holi in the mandir’s warm embrace, praying, eating sweets and marching in a parade along Jamaica Avenue in Hollis. They wound up at a concert in Haggerty Park along with hundreds of Hindus from seven mandirs, or churches, throughout Queens. Many of the mandirs’ devotees are originally from Trinidad or Guyana, where Holi is a national holiday marked by neighborhood-to- neighborhood revelry. Gyanda “Eric” Shivnarain, 42, a New York City Democratic political consultant, used this year’s Holi celebration to bring greater visibility to the city’s Hindus — which Shivnarain estimated at 150,000 of Indo-Caribbean descent and 200,000 from India.
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