The Ganesh festival is getting flabbier year after year. The idols
are getting huger (and more misproportionate and unwieldy); more groups of
‘devotees’, quaintly called ‘friends associations’, are jumping on the
bandwagon of having their own humongous idol and shamiana and everything else the rigmarole entails; more roads and
more of each road are obstructed by idols, scaffolds, decorations, stalls and visitors;
lots more greasy food and plastic utensils create lots more garbage and litter;
many more impressionable individuals are exhorted to uphold their traditions
(in many cases traditions adapted from others’); and many more individuals from
outside the fold feel out of place. Small-time politicians and thugs crop up in
all their lurid splendour on plastic banners all over the city wishing everyone
a happy Ganesh Chaturthi.
The remover of obstacles is, ironically, the epicentre of
obstacles. In a mad race for a demonstration of “mine's bigger than yours”,
idols and set-ups are expanding every year. Each customarily huge idol adds a
token unit (foot/inch) annually. The foods dedicated to the idol add a few
(hundred) kilograms annually. The garments woven for the idol add the mandatory
units decreed by the expansion in the idol's dimensions.
The eco-friendly wave, which seems to have percolated to a modest
extent into educated middle class households, is far, very far, from the huge
community dos. The idols are made in all their toxic glory miles away from the
city. They are then transported in trucks of different sizes that need to make
their way through tortuous lanes to place the idols in various
hard-to-negotiate nooks in every little basti
in the city. This journey can hold traffic up for hours with the crown/headgear
of the idol engaging in tussles with electric wires and poles along its
water-logged path (the rains are a faithful companion of the festival, and
water-logged, pothole-ridden roads a faithful companion of rainfall in the
city). Once the idol is established on its temporary throne, the lights,
littering and noise begin. Music, dancing, movies and contests whose contents
bear no obvious relationship to the festival abound for the next few days. Then
comes the dispersion brouhaha. Trees are pruned to let idols pass, cranes are
ordered, and then pavements broken and rebuilt every year at public expense, to
ceremoniously contaminate the waterbodies in and around the city.
The effort and expense that go into all this is depressing. The
plants that are mandatory in the performance of the puja are decreasing in, or
worse, disappearing from, the wild. Couldn’t ‘friends associations’ and
politicians wishing road users a happy Ganesh Chaturthi take up the task of
growing these plants and preserving water bodies? Couldn’t governments set a
nice low cap on the size of idols in community gatherings? Couldn’t plastic
banners be banned or at least made expensive enough to pay for their safe (read
least toxic) disposal? Why don’t communities restrict idols to temples, homes,
and ‘function palaces’, and stop blocking paths for days on end with these
celebrations? Why do ritual prayers need to be amplified? Who needs to hear
them other than the people on the spot for the puja, who can hear them without
the amplification anyway?
Can raucous celebrations for ten days make up for the regular
obstacles, such as dirty roads, burning garbage, non-existent or blocked
drains, and no greenery? Couldn’t the donations collected every year finance
one or more initiatives useful in the longer term instead of being squandered
in a few hours of crappy songs, greasy food, and half-understood slogans? It is
a sorry situation that the role of the lord of obstacle-removal is mostly
restricted to being the lord of obstacles.
