Residents of Mandalay, Myanmar (Burma), participate in the Water Throwing festival marking the Buddhist new year.

Celebrants in the Water Festival merrily douse each other with water by whatever means are available. The purifying ritual, which takes place in April each year, commemorates the participants' belief that water washes away the misdeeds of the previous year.

(Text adapted from and photograph shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Time and Again in Burma," July 1984, National Geographic magazine)