Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav

At two thirty five as we approached the Lalbaug cha Raja line we saw it increase metres in seconds. What seemed to us to snake down the lane and turn onto the street was incredibly long.

I made a gif to convey the shock with which we discovered the length of the queue. The yellow line is our assumption. The pink is how much we actually walked. The orange in an entire additional second line (whose origins are unknown to me) that we discovered much later on that was for people who wanted to go up onto the stage.




It took us three hours to get to see the idol. We amused ourselves with the rather odd way in which Gauri idols are sold and other random things.

At the end of it all, this idol really does not have the space that its contemporary, the GSB Seva Mandal has. It is not the ganpati of a community of jewelers and bankers and its new gold feet, hidden behind devotees, were not visible to us at all. The glimpse was but a couple of seconds, the photos undoubtedly will last longer, and that was it. Three hours of waiting, gone in a flash. The whole experience felt rather incomplete, rather like this post itself. Maybe when my wish comes true, the experience will feel more complete.