Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav

It amazes me every year, how insanely large ganeshotsav is in Mumbai. It is one of those things that adds up in small mandals that together on the last day flood themselves out onto the street. If these many people came out of their homes to ‘chill’ on Saturday nights, things would be insane! The Lalbaug cha Raja ganpati is quite different from the others. It has an exceptionally large fan following.

On visarjan day most people who don’t have anything to do with the organisation and have just brought their families to watch the festival come to Lalbaug rather than anywhere else. Somehow the Lalbaug parade gets bigger and bigger till its bigness is bigger than anything else.

The murti itself is gorgeous. I was under great pressure when I went to visit it and sadly I misjudged the care and beauty with which it was made, although I never even got a glimpse of the golden feet. I don’t understand at all how the system of visarjan works. I know that volunteers for LCR run up ahead of the whole visarjan parade and arrange the coming of everyone, but what about other ganpatis? How do they plan their visarjan so as to not fight over who gets to go first?

Certain chowks are key to the whole festival. The chowk under the Lalbaug flyover is one of them. Shroff building on the corner there organises a pushp varsha. An elaborate chariot with four white horses was constructed to ride across the skies and shower the Lord with flowers. Unfortunately I shot that video in portrait!

We walked the route of LCR till we got very tired and the rest of this post attempts to document the city preparing for ganpati rather than the ganpatis themselves. The occasional idol would rumble by amongst a gaggle of bombs

and then the street would go back to silent anticipation, waiting for LCR. Since there was no way possible for us to work our way to the front of the parade and walk down sant guruji road, we walked to the back and down Dr. Ambedkar road instead and joined the route back again at byculla station. Walking down NM Joshi marg we encountered Arun Gawli’s dagdi chawl ganpati and his puspha varsha for LCR.



Everywhere we went, random people would organise themselves to put up a stall serving free water to Ganesh Bhakts and random visitors. Outside the station, just somewhere on the road, everywhere, people had stalls giving water. Sometimes they would organise a pushpa varsha, to shower flowers or garland ganpati. The shroff building one was cool because it could go back to the building and refill itself. Some of the others were much simpler mechanisms. Sometimes at a chowk people would organise music for the entire day and others would put up large garlands. The point is that no one really knew each other. Imagine organising a festival in which there was no one central brain / event manager. People randomly decided what they thought the festival needed and collected funds and organised it. And all these small organisations came together to interact with each other very successfully. They rarely even had each others phone numbers. Add to this the police, who organised themselves all over the city without consulting the mandals. My sister was part of the Malhar organisation last year and she is of the opinion that without a central management her festival would have failed, yet here is a festival, so much bigger and crazier, and it actually organises itself. An intuitive festival! Who would have thought?

The weirdest of them all was ofcourse the DJ who came and set up shop on his own and brought all of the latest himesh tracks and played them inbetween ganpatis.


So a little further down we found a moduk that did pushpa varsha on behalf of the Mazgaon Padam wadi.



A small snafu happened where some flowers got out of control, but it was fixed in time with no major issues. In the meanwhile another ganpati left us in an explosion of string bombs covered in gulal.

At the end of NM Joshi marg we encountered the Khatau Mills whose chawls had organised a piaoo, all of the piaoos across the city use the same glasses and the same water containers, I wonder who supplies them?

And then we found the flyover, closed for the day, in front of the byculla firestation. The kids looked like they were finally enjoying the vision Mumbai endeavours!!






At the other chowk whose name I don’t know, under the byculla flyover, we found the LCR generator van waiting for the ganpati. It was getting dark and it would light up the idol all night before it reached girgaum at 5 am.

After some more busy chowks

We found some garlands



And then we reached a point where many ganpatis erged together. Do tanki. That was when things started getting crazy again. Although each ganpati procession is not to big on its own if two or three start coming together the cumulative effects somehow seem exponential.



From then on, the path of LCR is crazy, it takes lots of tiny lanes inside kumbharwada, the exact route after Sant Guruji marg is : NM Joshi road, Byculla station, Claire road, Nagpada, Duncan Road, Do Tanki, Kumbhar wada, Sutar Galli, Madhav Baug, CP Tank, VP Road, Prarthna Samaj, Opera House and finally girgaum chowpatti.

It reaches there at 6 in the morning the next day. We did not have the strength to follow the whole route so we short cut it through lamington road and then to opera house. It was night by then and there were atleast 6 ganpatis on the road at the same time. There were people returning from Visarjan, everyone seemed to be having a ball. By then we were completely exhausted and I headed home. What was sad was that the revelry had just begun. Ganeshotsav happens in the night, when the lights go on and the shpws start and the people get off work. I was rather sad that both years I forgot that and went out early in the day, much before the party actually started.