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Pillow fight erupts on New York streets

The feathers were flying in New York as a motley crew of between one and two hundred descended on the city’s Union Square Park to have a pillow fight.

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NEW YORK: The feathers were flying in New York on Saturday, as a motley crew of between one and two hundred descended on the city’s Union Square Park to have a pillow fight. Young children and adults alike came to bop their fellow New Yorkers on their heads.

So what did it feel like to go to a public park on a Saturday afternoon and hit other people with pillows? “There is a word for this in my country… ‘Rochela.’.. those times in which you laugh all the time, and you feel silly and childish, and you can’t stop it,” said pillow fighter Helene Alonso, a 31-year old native Venezuelan. “I ate a lot of feathers!” she adds.

“After 1 minute of thwacking and being thwacked, I was tired, covered in pillows, and blissfully happy,” says Philip Lukeman, New York University professor of chemistry and erstwhile pillowfighter. The pillow fight was an example of the social phenomenon known as smartmobbing.

Plans spread “virally” from person to person through the Internet, texting, and by word of mouth to converge at a particular place at a particular time to commit a particularly absurd act. As a result, very few of the participants know the sources of the idea for a New York pillow fight, Lori Kufner and Kevin Bracken.

The pair are 19-year-old students living in Canada who organised a pillow fight in Toronto in November after seeing pictures of a similar event in London. The New York pillow fight was created as part of their web-based political art project, newmindspace.com.

“Our…ideology is about reclaiming public space,” says Bracken. “We consider our events massive works of art that change the way people interact with a city.” “We feel that there are a lot of forces threatening public space right now; excessive advertising, overzealous police, and a general unwillingness to socialise in public as society becomes increasingly isolated.”

If the reactions of participants is any measure, the pair seems to have succeeded at beginning to change some of the things they don’t like. “I went by myself, but met up with friends…After all, a stranger is a friend you haven’t smashed in the face with a soft object in public,” says Lukeman. With pillow fights in New York and San Francisco the past two weeks, a global phenomenon is taking shape; Toronto, London, Tel Aviv, Milan, and Budapest have also all seen pillow fights in the past six months.

Could Mumbai be next?

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