cheap pandora rings A day of two festivals Grace

Tagged in: festival, Ganesha, India
Recent Posts on Notebook i: ########## ambition">Today from i: ########## ambitionOsama Bin Laden: The Unknown Cost of VictoryIan Tomlinson, and many others like him, deserve justiceCaught & Social: Fans enter the Twilight zoneReview: Camden Crawl 2011
Neon pink and orange Ganeshas have been on sale for weeks now, and in our street they had a whip-round to buy our own eight foot statue.  Men have teetered in stick ladders to rig the street with lights, and today the statue appeared, hung with lilies and balls of roses.  The cows that wander the streets kept trying to barge in and eat them, and had to be chased off.
The diversity, and the colour.  Two of my favourite things about India.  I don’t mean the diversity of (skin) colour – there’s plenty mention of that in the marriage listings – but the way this one country belongs to Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis, very few Jews and a whole lot of tribal religions, and all coexist in a riot of colour and festivals.  As well as Eid, the prolific Muslim holiday celebrating the end of Ramzan, today was also Ganesha Chaturthi, a Hindu festival celebrating the birthday of the elephant-headed god Ganesha.  A lovely day to be in India.
Outdoor tents of lights frame the festival-goers
Dancers perform in front of Lord Ganesha
Today the streets were strewn with many-armed elephant-headed statues,Christian Louboutin shoes sale iBet An in-form Wayne Rooney, and people taking pictures on mobile phones.  Down the road in the market, stalls piled with fragrant strings of jasmine armed families for the temple, or decorated women’s hair, as is the custom in southern India.  An entire side street had been turned into an outdoor marquee,pandora jewelry on sale Liverpool must win the cou, entered by ducking through a two storey black papier maché dome (young offenders outreach programme?) and into a long tunnel of lights, at the end of which reigned a 25 foot pink and gold Ganesha.  Dancing, singing, food and sequins: India certainly knows how to throw a street party.
Ganesha statues dot the city
A boy and girl walk in front of a model of Lord Ganesha on Ganesha Chaturthi, the festival to celebrate the birthday of the elephant-headed Hindu god, Bangalore, 12th Sept 2010
The most popular story of Ganesha’s birth starts in a bathroom.  Parvati,cheap pandora rings, the goddess consort of Lord Shiva the destroyer, was washing herself one day and wished the god would leave her to bathe in peace.  So she fashioned a boy child with the dirt she rubbed from her body, and set him to guard the door of the bathroom.  Shiva came to the room anyway, and, enraged at finding his path blocked, struck off the boy’s head.  Parvati was distraught at the death of her son, so Shiva sent a servant to find a replacement head for the body.  The servant returned with the severed head of an elephant,pandora jewelry sale How to rebalance our economy, which Shiva placed on the boy’s human body to create the Lord Ganesha, god of beginnings.
A family watches the celebrations