My Onum Experience

Cultural festivities is one of the significant celebrations for every ethnic group in many parts of the world. It was a joyful day for the people in Kerala, India as they celebrated their cultural harvest festival which is known as “ONUM” on Friday, 9th September. We, the post-graduate students celebrated it on Saturday, 10th September, due to our classes during the weekdays. Sixty percent of our post-graduate students are from Kerala.

We started our Onum festivity with the Eucharistic celebration celebrated by Fr Biju Joseph Karingalikattil. It was a Syro-Malabar rite Mass. I could only follow the readings and preaching which were in English and the rest of the Mass was in Malayalam. It was a pretty long Mass and I could not understand the significance of certain rites and rituals during the Mass which made me a little confused.

Fr Tommy, in his homily was preached about the legendary King Mahabali who kept his promises alive and fulfilled his name as the great martyr for the sake of Truth – Satya.

On Friday after dinner some of the students started to work on the decorations such as “pookalam” (with flowers) at our dining hall and also had a choir practice to bring more meaning to this cultural celebration.

On Saturday, after our breakfast many of the students were involved in the kitchen work such as cutting meat, vegetables, grinding flour, scrapping coconut, and cooking.

The students from Kerala themselves served the food for the distinguished guests and the rest of the students.

Before serving the food they sang Malayalam songs and had dance performances as well. Some of them came with their traditional clothing. Fr Saji greeted and thanked all the 30 students from Kerala and the others as well for working together to make the event a memorable one.

HAPPY ONUM – “MANUSHARELLARU MONNUPOLE”