– By Sudeep Gowrishankar, AI & Data Lead
Most of us think of Holi as a time to play with colors, feast, dance, and make merry. But the story behind it is especially meaningful for those of us who live or work with children.
Over the last six months, I have been working with an organization that aims to significantly improve the quality of early childhood education for underserved communities around the world — Rocket Learning. And during this time, I have found myself constantly reflecting on what education really means and how we should serve the children of the world as individuals, organizations, and societies.
The story of Holi unexpectedly threw light on this question through its deep, timeless symbolism.
The Story
The center of the story is a small child — Prahlad. His father, Hiranyakashipu, is a powerful king who wants complete control. He wants comfort, security, and unquestioned authority. More importantly, he wants everyone around him to worship him and accept what he says as truth. But his son, who is about four or five years of age, refuses to accept what he clearly sees as false. For this, he is pressured, threatened, and punished. Yet, he does not bend. Then, the king’s sister, Holika, plots to kill the child in a fire by sitting in it with him on her lap. She supposedly had the ability to be unharmed by fire. However, in a miracle, Holika is burned, while the child survives. The Holika bonfire that begins the Holi celebrations remembers this moment.
Symbolism
- The name of the king, ‘Hiranya-Kashipu’, means golden (हिरण्य) bed (कशिपु). The symbolism is of a desirous person who wants unlimited comfort and security. His insistence on being worshipped illustrates the desire for unlimited, and unquestioned authority.
- The child, Prahlad, is symbolic of that entity within us (since the child is the progeny of the same king) that sees the greed and falsehood in our lives, albeit silently.
- The plot to kill the child is symbolic of our common experience in which we try to silence our inner child that speaks the truth when it begins to stand in the way of our unending desire for comfort, wealth, power, prestige, and security. It is also important to see how the king is actually fearful of a little child that he deems it important to kill him. All the power and wealth in the world were, in fact, shaken by the presence of a small child standing with the truth.
From a psychological perspective:
- Hiranyakashipu represents the ego that wants comfort, power, and unquestioned authority.
- Holika represents the forces that protect that ego when it feels threatened.
- Prahlad represents the quiet voice within us that recognizes truth even when it is inconvenient.
- And the plot to kill Prahlad symbolizes the deep sense of danger, discomfort, uneasiness, and restlessness that arises for the ego with even the slightest suggestion of its falsehood.
Relevance To Education
Those who have interacted with children have probably seen how they “Say The Darndest Things”. They often see things directly and clearly. To us, however, their questions and statements often feel uncomfortable, but we find ourselves unable to find any fault with them. This directness comes to them because they are not as conditioned as adults. And our discomfort comes from the many layers of societal conditioning we have accumulated since childhood that prevent us from questioning many things.
This is why, often, adults silence such questions — not out of intentional malice, but because they themselves feel uncomfortable and unsure how to respond. And unfortunately, this is the beginning of the end of a child’s curiosity and the beginning of the same type of conditioning that begets the silencing of the next generation.
Reflection
The ending of the story can feel like a fairy tale. In real life, truth does not automatically win. Children’s curiosity and clarity can easily be silenced if we are not careful.
In the end, it comes down to a choice we make every moment we spend with children: whether we will preserve the clarity and innocence that come from their relative freedom from societal conditioning and fixed beliefs. And doing this is not effortless for adults. It requires us to notice our own conditioning, to sit with the discomfort that children’s questions can sometimes create, and to resist the impulse to silence them simply because their honesty unsettles us.
Perhaps the real reminder of the Holi story for those of us who work with children is that their curiosity, honesty, and courage are precious, and our role is to protect these qualities rather than gradually extinguish them through our unconscious behaviors. And the only way we can do this, as highly conditioned adults, is by observing our own reactions, looking through the discomfort we feel, and allowing children to hold up a mirror to our lives with their unsullied clarity, just as Prahlad did for his father.
And perhaps it is not just the physically present children in our lives who can show us the mirror — our inner child is always ready to wake up, wake us up, and play Holi with us…given a chance.