Ganpatti 2012
We have just survived another Ganpatti. Maybe India does get easier...
Ganpatti is an annual religious festival celebrating Ganesh, the elephant headed god much loved in Mumbai. Many families and societies bring Ganesh, in the form of a statue, into their home or into a temporary shrine or pandal that often takes up half a lane on the street.
Ganesh is hosted for a 1.5, 3, 5, 7, or 11 day stay with a senior family member required to stay in the home to host Ganesh. While Ganesh is in the house, Pooja’s are held and offerings are made. Bringing Ganesh into the home means significant commitment. Once started you need to invite Ganesh into your house for the next 5 years, the statue must never get smaller, no alcohol should be consumed and there must not have been a family bereavement in the prior 12 months.
Different societies, local communities and political parties compete to build the largest, most unique, Ganesh statue to which large offerings are made. The largest Ganesh statues are around 20 feet tall and are only limited by the heights of the bridges that they need to pass under on the procession to the ocean. There is a fierce competition between the societies for the best Ganesh in Mumbai
The question is, what do you do with a god when his stay has finished. You cant throw him out with the rubbish or dump him like an unwanted kitten on a street corner. The answer is that you organize a parade and immerse Ganesh in the ocean. This process occurs for the 55,000 significant Ganesh statues that are hosted around Mumbai.
These parades can vary from a push cart with a few drummers leading the way to elaborate floats designed to show off wealth and power. Wealthy societies assemble convoys of vehicles led by drummers and guys in powder blue track suits with saffron pom poms. Behind the pom pom boys is the speaker truck covered in massive speakers blasting Hindi music so load that you can feel it in your chest when watching from the 10th floor of our apartment building...even with the doors all closed. The sponsors (read wealthy) ride in an elaborately decorated float resplendent in white sari’s and kurta’s lounging with Ganesh and handing our sweets to the less fortunate as they weave their way through the suburb to the water.
In between the first two trucks is a generator van used to power the speakers on the first truck and the elaborate lights on the second truck. The array of spotlights shining from the second truck look like they were used in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. To me this seemed somehow appropriate.
Behind is a third truck blasting music followed by a procession of Range Rovers, Jaguars, BMW’s and Mercedes Benz’s with their drivers heading beach side to pick the boss up after Ganesh is immersed. Needless to say, this is not the case when Ganesh’s journey to the sea is undertaken in a push cart. As an aside, I read last night that the longest and seemingly largest Ganesh parade took some twenty hours to reach his resting pace. these parades are sooo sloooow.
Once at the sea, Gansesh is carried out by the devotees, the larger Ganesh’s being loaded on a boat and taken out in the sea to be immersed. If the waters around Mumbai were clear enough to allow any kind of visibility when diving there would be sedimentary layers of Plaster of Paris Ganesh’s built up off the coast rivaling the Great Barrier Reef as a dive site.
Once over we await the next festival Dussehra for Hindus and Bakra Eid for Muslims.
