The Great Ganesha

Well, the Ganesha Festival fervour is on in full swing (but thankfully, tinny music playing is still banned at night) and the ten-day visarjan date is only a few days away, on September 25th. While the statues get bigger, more elaborate and quite creative, the Arabian Sea gets more polluted.

Picture via Flickr user chinese_fashion

A “creative” Ganesha statue…

But there’s hope yet: The folks at Fropper.com are promoting a site – EcoGanpati.com – started by some people who are trying to salvage what?s left of the Arabian Sea. Here’s what they say:

The idols are made out of Plaster of Paris(PoP), which casts typically disintegrated water, thus making it necessary to be non-suitable for bathing, showering, or other activities involving contact with water.

These idols are then painted with ?some? dyes which contain poisonous elements like lead,mercury,carbon and cadmium. [link]

Well, it’s no joke. Take a look at the post-visarjan remains on the beach from a pic that I grabbed from their site. It’s pretty devastating.

Picture source: EcoGanpati.com

The post-immersion devastation

All this awareness is well and good, but what do they plan to do about it?

So, what we intend to do is:

• Spread knowledge
• Seek public interest
• Learn more ways and ideas of celebrating the occasion with more purity
• Share the results of this activity with the Government, the Mayors of Mumbai and Pune and the other concerned authorities. [link]

But that’s not all.

*** I intend to take print-out of the Petition page and, personally, deliver it to the concerned ministers and the Mayors.

***Also, the matters will not end with just submitting the petition, I will keep on updating about the action being taken by the authorities in this matter and will follow up diligently. [link]

You can support them by signing their petition. Go ahead and do it now – it only takes a second.

For those in the dark, Ganesh chaturthi or the Ganesha Festival is a period of ten days during which Ganesha is worshipped and elaborate idols are placed in homes and on street-corners. The festival culminates in the statues being immersed in bodies of water (in Bombay’s case, the Arabian Sea). Here’s an animated short by a National Institute of Design student which explains everything, and is pretty entertaining, too:

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