Ganesha Festival Part II

As mentioned earlier, Ganesha is a pretty significant deity here. The festival lasts about 15 days and besides the Puja celebrations attended earlier, the Ganesha statues for this festival have more in store for them besides being draped in flowers and inundated with incense:

On the 3rd day (the number 3 is an auspicious number, as are 5 and 9), and as the sun set, we conducted a Puja (prayer) for the two Ganeshas. Then the painted clay Ganesha that had mysteriously arrived in our house was given a front row seat in the car with his mother, Parvati.

We drove to the nearby lake and conducted the 2nd Puja on the shore. Caden was worried about crocodiles, but fortunately we didn't see any.

Once the Puja was done, Parvati and Ganesha were dunked in the water, never to be seen again.

On our return trip we ran across a bunch of young men getting ready to do a similar ritual with their Ganeshas.

Before driving to the lake with our green Ganesha, I had made a call to a friend of mine here to express my concern over this ritual. Hundreds of these Ganeshas, some of which are quite large, are sunk in the lake every year. They are made of clay and then painted; and the paints typically contain environmentally harmful metals and chemicals. I had asked if there is anything that can be done such that we didn't have to put the Ganesha in the lake. Unfortunately, there isn't: it has to be either a lake or a well.

There has been some push to "green" this tradition - such as going with unpainted statues - but I was told by our driver that when he looked, there were no unpainted statues to be found. The colors are apparently much more in demand and then as our driver said, "the lake is already dead, what difference does it make." True, the lake does receive thousands and thousands of gallons of untreated waste water and sewage, but I still couldn't help but feel a little remorse about the green and gold painted statue that we had put in the lake.