'Garbhavati Ganeshotsav'

My wife tried to hand me a plate of double omlette… (Mourya Rey...) But try as I did, my stretched hand simply couldn’t reach out… (Bappa Bappa…!!) Agonizingly close yet out of reach… Meanwhile Rafisaab consoled me for not being able to have my omlette and eat it too. With deep sympathy, he offered to sing ‘Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye To Kya Hai’ merely to (…Pudhyavarshi Laukarya) cheer me up… But I sullenly stepped out into Chandni Chowk and walked into Peaco’s where Seva had already ordered an English Breakfast … (…Ganpati Ka JayJaykaar)… Hungry and angry, I was just about to take my first spoon of kesari bath when a horrible sounding Indian wild ass, straight from the Rann of Kutch, barked into my ear… Garbhavati Ganeshotsav!

…and I jumped up, wide awake, bewildered. In a few moments, realising that I had a long day ahead, I sighed, even as something somewhere in me distinctly said, “Oh no, not again.”

It takes a lot for an average Mumbaikar to get annoyed. The level of tolerance we have for the otherwise intolerable is, I believe, considerably higher than the citizens of any other city.



We are okay with people, even those who ought to have better sense, peeing on the roadside in that peculiar position that pretends to not let an imagined gallery of onlookers to size them up.



We wouldn’t give the pan-chewing jerk more than a glare when he bends over us to spray his disgusting venom out of the local train window with practiced perfection.



We have never really thought much about the grey fumes emanating out of exhausts on our way to work or back home – it’s hardly on our radar.

All perhaps because everytime something annoying crosses our way, we tell ourselves, “A little more and we are home and it's bedtime.”



The soft and inviting 6”X5” corner of bedrooms is the typical Mumbaikar’s ultimate landing pad. By the end of the day we would kill (rhetorically speaking, of course) to slump into it, leaving worldly ‘pleasures’ (?!) far behind.



But it so often happens during this time of the year that our daytime battles loyally follow us into the other world, blurring the lines between the real and surreal. When that happens, you know the famed tolerance of the Mumbaikar (some funnily call it the ‘spirit of Mumbai’) is flirting with the limits. Mosquito coil-makers perhaps make a living out of keeping Mumbaikar’s patience from snapping.



The Ganesh Utsav is an annual test to verify the current irritability levels of the megalopolis’s citizenry – and if found to be amply high, to heighten it even more, whichever way possible.

Mumbaikars being Mumbaikars, one could pardon us for overdoing the circus as an antidote to the otherwise miserable lives we live. But you know the city has lost it when authorities take it upon themselves to join the madness.



As if the constant braying of loudspeakers and thumping of singularly tasteless drumbeats is not enough, the city transport service, BEST, has found an innovative way to drill the message of ‘look how annoying we can get’ into commuters’ heads. Their WMD is something called BEST TV.



Supposed to be an audio-visual medium to reach out to travelers with pious civic messages, tacky advertisements and Bollywood promos, BEST TV joined the ‘Ganpati’ celebrations this year with a programme of its own – a contest of the elephant god idols.



And the torment was let loose.



While the programme is called ‘Gharghuti Ganeshotsav 2010’, thanks to the state-of-the-art sound systems, the announcement virtually ends up saying ‘Gharbhavati Ganeshotsav – 2010’ every 15 annoying minutes, whether you like it or not. The genius who manufactured the bus (pssst… the Chinkis) or the sound system (possibly someone as technologically challenged as me) forgot to install a volume control device. But we have more. The same genius somehow managed to connect the sound system to the buses’ electronic route indicator. You dare to put off put off the audio, the indicator goes off too.



In short, the tragedy unfolds every day as I enter the bus, and plays out throughout my journey of 2 hours (one way) at the same insane volume. The excruciating exercise is interspersed with ear-blasting festival music, sloppy sloganeering and godforsaken balladry.



While I escape the visual impact by jumping into the seat facing the opposite direction, my ears and brains get drilled and chewed respectively. Actually, my ordeal with the inanities associated with Ganeshotsav began much earlier, some seven years back in Pune where I was a PG student. At that time the favourite recurring leitmotifs were a crappy bhangra number (Kala Kavva Kaat Khayega Sach Bol) and raunchy ‘item’ songs (Gur Ki Kali and Babuji Zara Dheere Chalo).



Actually, these songs are not bad if played in a disc or a college party. But in a Ganesh pandal? Well well...



The idea of public celebrations is itself unpalatable to me. But I abhor it when it spills over into the streets, intrudes your private space, makes sleep an improbable activity and all the time carrying absolutely no semblance of decorum associated with a religious festival.



Tilak’s intentions were noble when he sought to popularize the community celebration of Ganesh Chaturthi. He wanted to bring in a community feeling among Indians this way. Pity he didn’t prescribe an exit clause, because the community celebration of the Ganesh Chaturthi festival long seems to have lost its utility.



In today’s outrageously extravagant editions, the Ganeshotsav comes across as a gargantuan horror of sorts.



Besides eating up tonnes of money, resources and man-hours, the fortnight long celebrations are also single-handedly responsible for boosting air, water, noise and mind-space pollution levels.



As for me, this past fortnight has made me fleetingly miss the boisterous railway stations of Mumbai. Besides my double-omlettes of course.


“…Pudhyavarshi don’t Laukarya”! Please!