hand of god

hand, originally uploaded by seamonkeylifeboat.

Ganpati is celebrated for a week, mostly in Maharashtra. Altars are built all over, table size to building sized, in tents of bright cloth hung with fairy lights (they're not called xmas lights here even though they may still play terrible tinny xmas songs from a little box on the plug). For a week statues of Ganesh are carried through the streets with chanting, incense burning, throwing of dye powder, and dancing down to the beach where they are carried out into the water and left. We went fairly early on the last big immersion day, before it was totally packed with people. you could see the heads of the larger ganeshes above the water further out and the beach was completely littered with little hands and trunks and sequinned headdresses off the ones that had already begun to dissolve. they're made of plaster of paris (covered with paint and flocking and whatnot) and cause a fair amount of environmental concern... but the beaches here are bad at the best of times anyway.