Ganesh!

Ganpati Chaturthi is going on right now. It is this big festival for Ganesh, the god with the elephant head. It is his birthday. Ganpati is big in Mumbai, it is one of the biggest festivals all year. It isn’t in other parts of India. Different areas celebrate different things.

The festival starts, or started this year, on September 15th, and goes to September 25th. The first day people put up statues of Ganesh, and they have loud, exuberant prayer sessions called pujas for 10 days. One of my SAT kids said that the big days were 2, 5, 7, and 10, with 10 being the finale. On the tenth day eveyone takes their statues and goes down to the water and throws them in. Everyone has been telling me that it will be really really crowded and awful and that I should stay home, or at least not go alone. But I will probably go anyway. I mean, c’mon.

September 15, Day 1 Thought there would be a lot going on, didn’t see anything.

Day 2 Worked downtown. Didn’t see anything.

Day 3 Worked at the office in my neighborhood. Around 5 pm, this procession starts going by the office. It was kind of far away, but still sort of loud, so my SAT kid and I got up and looked out the window. After waiting for a few minutes, we saw men on horses ride by, lots of different groups of guys in different uniforms with funny hats, groups of men marching and dancing together in white uniforms, or in white shirts with red pajama bottoms, or in sequined, sparkly uniforms, groups of women dancing together with bright colorful saris on and teams of teenagers doing some sort of backwards forwards march step all playing some sort of cymbal thing. They were all adherents to a particular guru. You could tell because 6-7 times, a mini float with a huge photo of the guru was pushed intermittently along with the dancing crowd. The mini floats had a square base, and projecting up from the back was a huge piece of wood coming straight up with the guy’s picture on it. Sometimes he was in Indian wear, with an orange cloth draped around him, sometimes he was in a Western button up white shirt with black pants. It was funny to see people chanting praise to a guy dressed in business casual.

The organizers of the parade wanted to make sure everyone had something to dance to, so there were also 5-6 trucks that went along with the crowd with huge speakers stacked along the bed of the truck, blaring music. When my kid and I tried to get back to work, we couldn’t. We were 2 feet away from each other and couldn’t hear one another. It was crazy. I have never seen anything like it.

They completely blocked traffic on one side of a major street for almost 2 hours during rush hour. It was a really long procession, but my kid said that was nothing compared to Day 10.

My kid also scoffed at all the people, and said that these gurus just go on tv and start preaching and people send them money. Crores and crores of money. (A crore is 1000 lahks. A lakh is 10,000 rupees.) I said we had the same thing in the US.

Day 4 Nothing happened today.