WHY DON’T WE DO AWAY WITH `VISARJAN’…

While we celebrate Ganesh Chaturthi?

THIS will upset a lot of people but I say it almost every time one of our extremely eco-unfriendly festivals come around and not only because we eat too many sweets not to suffer from diabetes and its offshoot suffering! Surely a civilization we must keep changing for the better to keep pace with what’s happening to our one and only Mother Earth which so far has kept all live on our planet possible?
For 15 years while walking down Juhu beach in what was Bombay and then Mumbai today, I’ve seen the blind, unquestioning passion with we celebrate our religious festivals. We have got into our heads that all the grand and not so grand effigies of Lord Ganapati or Ganesh – our most popular “remover of all obstacles” deity – must after all the rites and rituals are over 15 and more days, we must set to sea waters or well waters or any water body we may find nearby! Likewise with goddess Durga mata during Durga Puja festival and I think more and there are other festivals like the Chaat Puja when we see a host of various deity idols or images set to varnish in water bodies near and far…
The result: the very next morning seashore is packed with all the floating debris of broken deities, much of it in a sorry state, and along with all this debri we see the dead marine life which had no choice but to drink in heavily poisoned water, courtesy the chemical and artificial material with which craftsmen have created the idols to look gloriously beautiful…the more gloriously creative the more they cost! Religious celebrations have become so grossly commercial and while I understand the need to earn a livelihood – must we abuse the very tenants of fair play when it comes to using and abusing the earth which keeps us alive from the bottoms up or so speak?
What are our senses for if we do not see, hear or speak up! Blind, deaf and dumb is how we play it to the tune of our populist need to celebrate. For example, we know how the Ganesh festival grew so big, check out its historical political context; there for a reason why “sarvajanik” or community mass celebrations came about – the reason is over, gone with the wind, yet we continue to sing songs for dead causes – if I may say so.
I ask you, so what if we worship a Lord Ganesh in our home day and day out and do extras over the same Lord Ganesh idol come Chavath or Ganesh Chaturthi. Ditto for the Goddess Durga and all the other pantheon of gods and goddess who presumably love water so much that it must be their permanent home or some such thing.
The times have changed, our ways of thinking must change surely – if our celebrations are contributing to contamination of the earth and planet big time now? We see and hear and smell the rot all around as we tread our way through urban and rural landscapes, we justify all, for what good? So that we may feel saintly because we have spent X amount of funds to worship so and so and so and so godly deity out of piety or fear of karmic retribution or whatever else?

Must we not as a civilization change for the better? Alive to current situations and where we’re headed in the near future down routes of certain perdition or at least continuing worsening of the plight of a struggling Mother Earth which many of do worship – even as we return to waging more and more deadly genocidal wars with one another with newer and newer tools of destruction, which also impact the very air we breathe, water we drink and food we eat? So clever and yet unable to connect the dots, fit the jigsaw puzzle, paint the picture increasingly rotten at the core of the womb and bosom of the earth?
Well, I’ve said my piece here. Is any government strong enough to ban the madness of this event called “visarjan” of Lord Ganesh or Durga Mata or any other godly idols in our water bodies? How much public and private money would we be saving if simplify or transcend some of our ugliest religious beliefs! Or are we so dead to in mind and body, heart and soul to make that giant leap forward into a heaven on earth on which all may live to be happy? Of course the genealogy of Lord Ganesh or Ganpati or his other 108 names is impressive and we may go ga ga over it piously…but cut through all the ga ga please, can we do it for a far superior cause? The cause of all life on earth living a blessed life instead of a constantly cursed life and it’s not the primeval law of survival I have in mind here!

This is an old Ganesh idol gifted to Rajan Narayan by the mother of a Christian friend of his, Prof Peter Ronald deSouza of Panaji. The idol is worshipped daily and annually during Ganesh Chaturthi, but there is no visarjan! The diya is made of carved granite.

I ASK you isn’t it possible we invest in a Ganesh idol and do everything we do during Ganesh Chaturthi time – and just skip the “visarjan”? Our Lord Ganesh deity or idol may be of some natural material such as traditional mud or terracotta, wood, gold and silver or precious stone or any natural stone, even paper mache (if you remember how exquisite Kashmiri paper mache artefacts are)…and yes, it would be great if we matched our Lord Ganesh passion with the thought that after all this is the story of how Lord Shiva asked for a baby elephant’s head to be removed and so transplanted it on his son’s head (which he had sliced off in a fit of anger)…the legend story has it that the goddess Parvati was having a bath and asked son Ganesh to be on guard, permitting no one to disturb her. Shiva of course away on one of his expeditions didn’t know he had a son and so seeing this kid telling him he may not enter his own home, lost his marbles. Something like that.
Many are the stories to do with our elephant god Lord Ganesh. Most believe that mainstream upper class society adopted him from some tribal elephant god! Do we take mythological stories with deadly seriousness or do we just imbibe the evergreen folk stories of morality which come along with them with a pinch of rationality and sensibility? If you’re asking me my friends every Ganesh Chaturthi celebration I would find out how many real world elephants there are still living in our forests…how they are tamed and used and abused in places where elephants are still used as animals of labor; our temples too domesticate elephants.
When forested land is cleared and elephants return to eat the crops planted on their old habitat, people throw acid on them, enraging the magnificent wild animals credited with fantastic memory. Elephants in the wild have been hunted and poached for their valuable tuskers, ivory, worth more than gold by craftsmen…and much more. I mean in time to come there will be now wild elephants left on the good earth, and they will exist only a Lord Ganesh idol beauties as valuable art in our homes or worshipped in our home altars or in temples. Actually, Goa home to many temples has an old world temple dedicated to Lord Ganesh and it is at village of Khandola in Ponda taluka. Maybe we can just limit worship of Lord Ganesh at temples dedicated to him – keeping the commerce and hype to a minimum?
Well, my dears, this are just ideas I offer so that we cut down on the waste and the want in which some of our religious festivals indulge in, if only we can be a little more mindful and sensitive and practice minimalism instead of self-indulgence for absurd, utterly irrational reasons. I am not against creativity of any kind but even creativity needs tempering for a larger and far more important causes…
ON that note it’s avjo, selamat datang, poiteverem, au revoir, arrivedecci, hasta la vista and vachun yeta here for now!