Ganesha Banda.............

Most of us know the story behind the Ganesha festival becoming “Street Friendly “ , if not, a quick briefing : During THE freedom struggle, THE British Raj banned people gathering as a technique to prevent them from getting together and protesting against them. As all issues have a work around, our freedom fighter Mr. Baal Ganghadara Tilak, came up with a smart idea to gather people and pass on the message of freedom by making ganesha fest a public event.
Since childhood, Ganesha has always been a fantasy and a very appealing god to me may be because of the elephant look and being foodie, also two days holiday in a row and the story tales of him made him a superstar god to us.
During my school days, in our whole area, there used to be one or two public events of LORD Ganesha, held for 3 to 7 days attracting a large crowd. We never used to get permission to attend these as we were very little and my mother would always used to fear that we would get lost in the crowd. Once during this festival, as part of the entertainment, they had arranged a film screening in a park and I happily went with my sister without telling at home resulted in my mom searching for hours and at last found me in the crowd, ending in a beating session and I walked out, eyes brimming with tears and a running nose.
So when I was in 6th or 7th standard, all my friends (a gang of around 30 guys), decided to celebrate the event in our street. A guy called “Harisha” became our leader (Qualification: Older than the rest of us& a rowdy) and started giving us instructions on the things to be done. To raise funds we had come up with a lottery system, offering a Mixie, A Table Fan, and Steel Boxes as the prizes. All of us were given a book of 50 chits to sell, each ticket costing RS. 5. As one more technique of fund raising , we had Golkas ( Piggy bank) prepared using old talcum powder and tooth powder boxes, shaking them in front of the pedestrians, not leaving them until they put some money in to it.
As the event was nearing we went to each house on our street for collection, and people gave whatever they could afford to. Had a lot of work to do like cleaning up the area, digging the road for the pillars, getting the idol on a pushing cart, decorating the street with color papers. Guys had such high level energy that each one of us was like built to kill. Any work and every work, no break, no food.
The event was for 3 days and had the orchestra program on the second day, which was the favorite day among all. The last day was the idol immersing day, with a grand procession, where we used to dance and chill for the whole 3 – 4 hrs.
With such a small budget and resources we used to have so much fun, but now we are kind of fixed to a routine life. Most of the guys are in a job earning a decent salary and it’s not a very tough job to do such an event, but we all end up claiming we have “no time” (even then we had 24 hrs only in a day) and act busy. Idea of sharing all this with you came to my mind when last week in Mysore, some guy approached me to buy a lottery ticket for Ganesha Festival. The whole story came to my mind as a piece of nostalgia.