Give me the happiness and Auspiciousness...Take the sorrows away!
These were verses we all were singing on this Sunday(7th Sept.) during Ganpati Visarjan.
We were quite excited when we came to know that we could get (had to book it beforehand) 'ganapati's idol, made of clay' from a temple near by and so we could celebrate 'Ganesh Chaturthi' here in Canberra as well.
There's a big enough Hindu community and Ganesh festival is being celebrated since 1995 here. Special permission is granted for Visarjan in a lake on the Sunday after 'Ganesh Chaturthi' every year.
About 50 people had gathered for the pooja and bhojan prasadam. As it was a multi-linguistic, multi-cultural crowd, bhajans were sung in various languages like Marathi, Kannada, Hindi, English etc. There were devotees who had settled in Australia from all parts of India. The lunch was pooled by all of us and was really an eclectic collection of Indian cuisines - from sambar rice to aloo-chhole(chick-peas), from payasam to halwa-barfi.
We were just a bunch of Indians collected to give a warm farewell to Ganapati.
Isn't it an irony that we have to move out of our country's border to come to think of it as a nation without internal boundaries?
So, after lunch, we all started for the lake. The Ganesha's idols in a ute, with a few people in it chanting 'Ganapati Bappa Morya' and about 25 cars following it. Oh, it was fun. We all were driving at a speed of 20 kmph in a 80 kmph zone, ofcourse we all stuck to the leftmost lane, letting the other vehicles pass by.
At the lake, a wooden half-bridge kind of structure let us to the middle of the water-body. Our excited chantings of 'Ganapati bappa Morya, Mangal Murti Morya' had attracted some Aussies, they even called their kids to see the colourful procession :)
As Ritesh stretched his arm to let go the Ganesh-statue in water, I noticed the change of his expression and felt a lump in my throat too.
On our drive back home, we discussed the significance of 'Ganesh -Visarjan', have found this piece on net which explains it pretty well.
