Ganpati Bappa...Morya!!

This past Sunday I had the pleasure to not only attend but participate in the final and main event of the Ganpati Festival here in Pune. The Ganpati Festival is a ten-day celebration of the Hindu god Ganesh, who's domains include wisdom and general prosperity! First a little background on the festival itself though. In our first few days in Pune, leading up to festival, we saw dozens of temporary platforms under construction around the city, each preparing to house its own Ganesh idol. Once the festival began, the platforms came to life, with vast differences in how each community-sponsored platform decided to worship their Ganesh. While many were ornate, peaceful tributes to the elephant-headed god there were also some very...creative displays. These included a few that apparently imagined Ganesha as quite the raver, with bumping music and flashing lights , one with a Ganesh made entirely out of cork and a perplexing platform that had a live-action performance on stage that involved some sort of exchange between Adolf Hitler and Gandhi. While we only saw a few of these platforms in our area of Pune, there were apparently several hundred of these displays scattered across the city, each waiting to be immersed in the local river following the procession.

The procession itself gave one the impression of a complex crossover between New Year's, the Macy's Day parade and what I can only imagine Woodstock would have been like if there had been more Indians and less "free love." The marchers wind down a major thoroughfare in Pune known as Laxmi Road, known for its shopping and the strange phenomenon that prompts Westerners to pay four times the actual price of a good and still think they got a good deal. On procession day though, the pirates of Pune close up shop and the street floods with people, to the point that we had to move in a twenty-person long conga line to make any progress up or down the street. While the original plan had been to camp out on the second floor of a restaurant owned by the mother of one of our Indian buddies, by the time we arrived the place had become so jam packed with patrons that only two members of our group could go up at a time, and still might not be able to see. This left the rest of us to settle for street level viewing, which turned out to be so bad thanks to the blessedly poor prevalence of the tall gene among Indians.

As the pictures hopefully demonstrate, the part of the parade that we got a see consisted predominantly of musicians, specifically drummers, and even more specifically drummers who like to play load, which, to be fair, basically goes without saying. The drummer bands were essentially split into three parts, the biggest section being bass drummers who had massive drums strapped around their stomach (they occasionally swung these around while playing and I can only imagine how they avoided severe whip lash each and every time). The second smaller section consisted of what were basically snare drummers, with one lead performer (resident baller of the group) playing a different rhythm every other 4 counts and the rest providing a echo. Finally there were one or two "performers" whose instructions I can only hazard to guess were "Here are some hammers-now continue to wail on this circular piece of metal as hard as humanly possible until otherwise notified." Needless to say this was not an event for the faint of eardrums. Occasionally the bands were accompanied by flag bearers carrying tall poles and moving in time with the drumming. I found these guys particularly exciting because half the time I could only see the flags and not the bearers, which gave me the distinct impression of watching a medieval army march of some kind.

After a little while of just standing on the sidewalk watching the parade go by, we realized that the pace of the marchers had gotten progressively slower until finally the parade had basically come to a complete halt. No one seemed perturbed by this, and the drummers kept on drumming, but none of us could figure out why everything had stopped. Then another Alliance student realized that a large number of former spectators were now participants and dancing in the middle of the parade with the drummers. Seeing as absolutely no one had stepped in to stop them, we soon determined that this was just another part of the Ganpati experience, and after clearing it with an Indian buddy we decided to become a part of it! First only a few of us, but then everyone, piled over the barriers separating sidewalk from street and joined in the revelry taking place in the middle of the parade. Fortunately, the Indians already getting their street dancing on were happy to have us and eagerly invited us to dance with them. Being young, impressionable Americans looking to have a good time we were only too happy to oblige. The drummers were spectacular and really kept the excitement level up despite the parade remaining at a standstill. Eventually people started getting hoisted on to other peoples' shoulders as part of the general ecstasy/madness, and after a failed attempt at getting on my friend Taylor's shoulders (though the reverse worked fine as the pictures attest) an eager middle-aged Indian man stepped in to provide a helping hand, or in this case set of shoulders. I'll admit to being a little skeptical of getting on the shoulder's of a man I had never met, let alone speak English to, but with a more than helpful boost from those around me, next thing I knew there I was above the crowd. While terrifying is probably the first word that comes to mind on reflection of my time up there, it was also a ton of fun and hugely exhilerating- definitely recommened for the next time you find yourself in a parade in a foreign land with access to a willing pair of unknown shoulders.

While many of us would have been way more than satisfied with the procession after our impromptu dance party, our Indian buddies insisted that there was one more element that we just couldn't miss. If you've skipped ahead to the pictures than you might have already guessed what this "element" entailed- namely, a lot of red powder known as gulal. This lovely substance has the awesome property of sticking to clothes and skin incredibly easily and then being almost impossible to wipe off without just spreading it even more (sort of like a real life, though less painful, version of the multiplying treasure in Bellatrix's vault). Coming back to my preview from the last post, this is where I got the day-long nickname of Red Beard, for fairly apparent reasons (The nickname "Wow, you looked like you mauled a deer" also had a lot of play). While I initially avoided the allegedly heavily-staining substance (which turned out to be totally false, washed right out!) one of the kind powder throwers noticed my reluctance and naturally sent a huge clump of the stuff soaring over the crowd and right into my face. At that point resistance was clearly futile, so I joined in with the rest and began hurling the stuff wantonly in the general direction of my fellow Americans. After we had all gotten our fill (covering?) of the gulal, we made our way off of Laxmi Road, tired and wide-eyed but deeply, deeply satisfied. While I'm disappointed I'll miss the next major celebration in Pune, Diwali (which the office tells me is basically Indian's version of Halloween), I'm confident that the Ganpati procession is a memory I'll take with me for the rest of my life and one of the major highlights of my trip-- and I haven't even been here one month yet! In the interest of time (as well as lack of creativity) I'm leaving the pictures without captions for right now, but hopefully they give at least a small sense of the chaos, beauty and sheer ecstasy of the Ganesh procession. Ganpati Bappa... Morya!!