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:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

The horseshoe crab or limulus polyphemus is not really a crab. It’s more closely related to spiders and scorpions (see a baby horseshoe crab, right, and an adult male, below left). But despite its uglier (if you’re arachnophobic) and sometimes fatal cousins, this arthropod provides a valuable service to the medical community – a substance manufactured from their blood is used to test for bacterial toxins. The “crab” has also not evolved much over the last 300 to 400 million years, which makes it an interesting animal. It also looks a bit like the crab version of Robocop if you ask me, which is why you shouldn’t. And if you had to ask me (once again, I highly recommend against this) why they have not had to evolve over the last few hundred million years, I would say it’s because of their Robocop-like protection, which allows them to deflect anything that might harm them. Told you not to ask…

And, oh yeah, they really do have blue blood – their blood has copper compounds making it blue, as opposed to our (assuming you’re a human reading this) blood which has iron compunds. Human blood is red, by the way, for all you non-humans reading this. The Great Ganesha writes for everyone…