Adilabad district of Andhra Pradesh is usually in news for all the wrong reasons like a death sentence given to a police informer by a Maoist-held Kangaroo court, or a sacrifice of a child by superstitious parents. But on the eve of Holi, this is a place where people do all the right things and one of them is celebrating Holi with natural colors, made of flowers including the bright, fresh and beautiful Palash (Butea frondosa). 
Use of natural colors, I am told, has been an old tradition and it has survived the pressure of changing time and availability of cheaper, chemical-based powdered colors. The preparations for the festival of colors begin a week before.
People - and this includes both the young and the old - get busy with making natural colors from plants and flowers that are available locally.
