Flights of Fantasy over the City of Lakes - Bhopal

The feeling of being above the ground at 4000 feet plus, in an 360 degree open air basket, with early morning chill caressing your skin along with carrying a chilly feeling deep inside down your heart that if something goes wrong at that height. All this is fun at one time when you take a ride in a Hot air balloon.
What can shake one from not entering the fantasy flight is with your inaugural flight crash landing from a height of 400 to 500 feet, with you sitting in crash land position and the basket hitting tree branches and a roof of a building before you realize that you have landed with a roaring thud. This experience happened to me in my first flight along with another fotog from a agency, who refused to enter the hot basket sitting that he would rather shoot from the ground during an adventure ride with the 3 EME center based in Bhopal in December 2002.
The harness wire which the captain of the balloon handles caught fire and snapped. Thanks to Major Bhaskar who was our team captain who kept his cool and did the landing in the safest way possible, thus ensuring that there was no injuries to any of the five occupants. Later before we could reload our senses and take our seats with one member short, we took off again but this time with more confidence and after ensuring that all the things were in place.
As for me I took the bull by the horn, and was all excited to get some very exciting pictures of the city of lakes and the rural side of it.
What you get to see below appeared in the front page of the HT Bhopal Live of my personal experience and the pictures I took from 4000 to 6000 feet above ground.
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Its as close it gets to being on a flight of fantasy in the real world. Rising slowly above the terra firma in a hot-air balloon and seeing the world from 4,000 + feet high. And there's nothing to compare with a hot-air balloon ride. In a fast train the landscape whizzes by in a blur: In a hot-air balloon, the meadows just keep getting smaller and smaller as time virtually stands still.

Even for any Fotog with a seasoned eye for visuals, it's quite a spectacle taking time to sink in. And it was that kind of day for a couple of lens men, who were taken up a hot air balloon with them by Army Adventure Wing members of the 3 EME Center.
Major Bhaskar was at the helm as the balloon took off. For a slow rising mass of hot-air, contraption of ropes and the balloon itself, it was surprising to see it still took a lot of skill to rise slowly and navigate in the face of smoe pretty quirky wind.

Naib Subeidar Santosh was in charge of the other balloon as the two spectacular machines rose in tandem from the Jeet Stadium at the EME Center. The wind was strong throughout and favored North-West. The speed of the balloons was 25 nautical miles before we smoothly landed on the farmland near Khukaria village about 45 Kilometers away from the main road.
Major Bhaskar and Santosh plan to cross the Arabian Sea in February 2003, a feat that would be under-taken for the first time by any Asian. These rides are their practice flights and meant to sharpen their skills. After all, a botched ride over a desolate stretch of the Arabian Sea could be rather unforgiving.

During the ride, we saw nomadic tribesmen from Rajasthan herding their live stock and camels, across the rural hinterland. Their annual migration into the State's 'greener pastures' has just begun.
Even as the camels gently strode across the vast plains underneath, Major Bhaskar's balloon gently brushed some treetops, a bit scary for the second time in one day, for a ballooner but a routine experience for the immensely skilled officer.
The balloon itself was of rib-knit nylon to take up to 140 to 160 degrees of heat blown from four blowers fixed to gas cylinders.

Major Bhaskar says you need a keen knowledge of the wind velocity and also the knack of blowing enough hot air to avert mishaps.
Colonel Balasubramaniam, the head of the ground staff which helps retrieve the hot air balloons after they land, says it is easy to fly high but following the balloon is the tricky part because they have to stick to roads and then make their own track to reach the balloon far afield.

Jhabua the Land of Tribe's

Jhabua is a predominantly tribal district located in the western part of Madhya Pradesh. It is surrounded by Panchamahal and Baroda districts of Gujrat, Banswara district of Rajasthan and Dhar and Ratlam districts of Madhya Pradesh. River Narmada forms the southern boundary of the district.

The terrain is hilly, undulating typically known as 'Jhabua hills topography'. In this Jhabua hill topography the difference between the highest and the lowest points is varies between 20 to 50 meters. But this difference goes on increasing as we move towards south of Jhabua.

In Alirajpur division which is in the south of Jhabua the areas is almost entire hilly and intersected by narrow valleys and low Vindhayan ranges covered with jungles. But most part of Jhabua is without any forest cover because of low fertility of land and soil erosion even mere existence becomes a hard problem and with the failure of rains the Bhils take to crime.
Jhabua is sparsely populated area with the total population of 13.94 lakhs.

The total area is 6793 Sq Kms. There are about 1313 inhabited villages. Out of which 47 per cent of the people live below the poverty line. Thus, Jhabua is an overwhelmingly tribal and poor district. The district is devoid of vegetation cover except Katthiwada and other patches and is full of undulated, hilly areas.


The area suffers from poor and skeletal soils with shallow to very shallow depth and erratic rainfall , high temperature . This area has two tribes named the Bhil and Bhilala.

BHIL Tribe
The Bhils are the third largest tribe in India. In the state of Madhya Pradesh, they are prominently found in the Dhar, Jhabua, and West Nimar regions. Anthropologists believe that the word Bhil is derived from the Dravidian word bil or vil, meaning a bow.

Over a period of time, the Bhils have given up hunting, and have taken to agriculture. They use very primitive tools, and even their agricultural style is very simplistic.

Bhil villages are generally dispersed, and each village consists of thirty to forty families. They worship numerous Hindu deities, chiefly a deity by the name of Raja Pantha. Bhils also worship crops, fields, water, the forest, and the mountains.


The Bhil dialect consists of Rajsthani, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi words, and also some unique words without any non-Sanskrit elements in it. Sawang is a popular form of entertainment among the Bhil tribals that consists of story telling combined with dancing and music. In the 1940s Uday Shankar tried to expose the performing arts of this tribe to the outside world.

Bhilala
Bhilala tribe is a tribal group located in the states of western and central India. They speak the Bhilala language which belongs to the Indo-Aryan linguistic family. The Bhilalas are descendants of the Bhil and Rajput immigrants.


The Bhilalas primarily work as farmers, farm servants, field laborers, and village watchmen. They grow crops such as millet, maize, wheat, and barley in the fields. The highlanders live in houses made with walls of sticks intertwined with twigs and small branches. Clay tiles, straw and leaves are used for the roof.

Each village is led by a head man, Mandoi, who takes care of the domestic disputes in his village. Familial ties are very strong, and they believe in the connection between the living and the dead. Male descendants inherit the property. The Bhilalas marry from their own class. For marrying into a different class, they have to convert to the higher class and leave behind all family ties. The Bhagoria festival of the Bhilala and other tribes in this area is unique in its own way.


This annual festival is celebrated with great fun and frolic, where a young man gets a chance to choose his bride from the crowd of women gathered there. The groom has to pay a dowry to the brides parents.

Bhilalas are known for their colorful, embroidered garments. Tattooing is very common among the villagers. Bhilalas love dance, drama, and music. They practice some type of ethnic religion. Hindu gods are worshipped commonly but catholic Bhilalas are known to exist in some states. Every family has its own guardian deity. Bhilalas are very superstitious and they believe in taboos and curses.

The Bhilalas are experts in handling the bow and arrow. The bow is a characteristic weapon of this tribe and they usually carry their bows and arrows with them. But with the change in technology they have started to use the double barrel guns.







The transport to these villages is by overloaded buses, jeeps, cycles and of course our last stretch will be by foot. Get ready to lose some weight if you do plan to visit these traibal of Jhabua but anyway one can still stay high on their toddy.

Bhagoria - Festival of Hue and Color

This colorful festival of the Bhils and Bhilalas, particularly in the district of West Nimar and Jhabua, is actually in the nature of a mass svayamvara, a marriage market, held on the various market days falling before the Holi festival in month of March every year. As the name of the festival indicates, - bhag, to run, - after choosing their partners, the young people elope and are subsequently accepted as husband and wife by society through predetermined customs.

It is not always that boys and girls intending to marry each other meet in the festival for the first time. In a large number of cases the alliance is already made between the two, the festival providing the institutionalized framework for announcing the alliance publically. The tradition is that the boy applies gulal, red powder, on the face of the girl whom he selects as his wife. The girl, if willing, also applies gulal on the boy's face.
This may not happen immediately but the boy may pursue her and succeed eventually.

Earlier, the Bhagoria Haat also the place for settling old disputes; open invitations were sent to enemies for a fight in the HAAT. Bloody battles used to be quite common in the past but today police and administration do not allow people to go to the HAAT armed.

The Bhagoria haat also coincides with the completion of harvesting, adding to it the dimension of being an agricultural festival as well. If the crops have been good, the festival assumes an additional air of gaiety.

In the life of the Bhils and Bhilalas, Bhagoria is not merely one festival but in fact a series of fairs held one by one at various villages on their specific market days, commencing eight days before Holi.