Twenty- five Seven

The morning after : would Ganpati have liked this? #MondayMusings

September 24, 2018

The Morning After

The morning after is always a disaster. Especially if the party has been going on for 10 days as it was for Lord Ganesh. Yesterday it was 10 days since Ganpati came down to Mother Earth in general and Maharashtra in particular. Ever since Lokmanya Tilak revived the tradition of a community Ganesh celebration, this festival has grown beyond the first Ganeshotsvan at Keshavji Chawl in Girgaon. Year by year the idols are getting larger, the decorations more elaborate, the festivities more raucous and sadly the noise level deafening.

Mumbai , a city that is already struggling with a burgeoning population, killer pot holes, traffic snarls with the Metro mess and uncontrolled number of cars, now also has to deal with disruptive festivities every now and then that literally bring religion out from homes, temples and churches and onto the roads.

Last Night

Last night around 8 pm I got a frantic call from Anna Shetty who was scared to walk home against a crowd that was literally pouring onto the streets like a flood. She was called for an emergency and it took her an HOUR to get to the hospital. Luckily for the patient, the Lord was on his side and he could wait till the anaesthetist ( Anna Shetty) could attend to him.

If this was not bad enough, it was impossible for her to get home by car and finally abandoned the UBER to walk the last 500 m. home. But it was literally like jumping from the fat into the fire as she had to push and shove her way through while trying hard to ignore the open groping that she was subjected to.

Luckily, the Lord was with her too, and she managed to get home to safety.

But the drums that were beating from 6 pm went on and on – loud, tuneless and completely ear shattering !The revellers carried on relentlessly regardless of the time restrictions and concern for young children and old people. Finally when they stopped beating, I woke up with a start, suddenly aware of the silence that descended early in the morning.

The morning after

This morning while returning home from the school drop, I found the road a river of red and orange – powdered colour that the wild crowds had showered on the departing Elephant God and the cars parked along the roadside.

All that was left after 10 days of festivity was detritus and debris .

I wondered if the Elephant God or any god for that matter would approve of the noise and the bawdy celebrations.

These are my personal thoughts and I would like to state that I am a practicing Hindu and respect the sentiment and right of others to express their faith in the manner they choose to. All I ask of them is a little concern for those who cannot or will not share in their celebrations. Surely they have the right to a bit of peace and quiet too?

[bctt tweet=”Dear Lord, I ask you, do You approve of this cacophony and crass commercialisation in Your name ?” username=”viaunishta”]

Sharing these thoughts on #MondayMusings hosted by Corinne of EverydayGyaan.

Ciao
#MyFriendAlexa – a learning lesson

September 23, 2018

It’s official I’m out !

Well, to all those participating in Blogchatter’s third season of #MyFriendAlexa, let me assure you that I am officially out of the challenge. I quit this challenge after the first week itself but have still been visiting some of the posts on the reading lists that I manage to track when I get the time.

Let me assure you that this is not going to be another post where I diss this challenge: so you can breathe normally now .

But there are some lessons I learnt from this challenge .

And today my Global Alexa Rank is 670,059 and Indian Rank is 42,414. So even though I’m not part of the challenge, my Rank has dropped 59,717 points!

What was most heartening was that most bloggers commiserated with me and tried to make me understand where I was going wrong with the challenge. Thank you Vasantha, Mayuri, and Shalz for making me see reason.

Comments

My post explaining my position got the single largest number of comments I’ve ever had for a post.

Thank you Manas, Akshata, Pratikshya, Holly, Parul, Damyanti, Maheshwaran Jothi, Dr, Amrita, Esha, Shilpa, Sudha Krishnan, arv, AnshuBhojnagarwala, Soumya,Kalpana, Vinodini, Vinitha, Tina, Vartika Gakhar, Sonia Chatterjee, Rubina Ramesh for your comments that were frank. Some of you were sympathetic and some of you weren’t. But I thank you for taking the time from this busy and exhausting challenge to leave your comments on this post.

The Biggest Takeaway

So finally, I am glad I did the challenge for a week because I learnt a lot and met some interesting new bloggers.

Ciao,
Why we need # WorldGratitudeDay

September 22, 2018
Why do we need #WorldGratitudeDay”?

I was one of those skeptics who not only pooh-poohed the whole idea but also avoided any Gratitude Posts put up on the blogosphere. Somehow I felt that putting out the things I appreciate would invite the “Evil Eye”. My friend Corinne often told me that this is not the case. But I still did not buy her belief.

This does not mean that I am not grateful for the things in my life. I just felt that it would somehow be boastful and even attract the ‘Evil Eye”. But there were times when I felt compelled to express my gratitude and actually linked up with Vidya Sury’s Gratitude Circle. Now I try to be a regular and find that it felt good.

What I learnt about doing a gratitude post is that
- Expressing gratitude does not attract the evil eye. On the contrary, I realised that people are too busy with their own lives to think about what you’ve written about yourself and your life.
- Expressing gratitude makes it easier to accept things. Very often, I grumble about the silly little things in my life. But when I take a step back and think about what could have been worse, I find that I should be grateful for what I have.
- Expressing gratitude makes you realise that you do have a lot going for you. My life is a very ordinary life. Every day is just like every other day. I get up, get ready for the day, go through the day and at sun down get ready for bed. But humdrum as it may sound, when I write things down, I realise how grateful I should be that my life is just normal.
- Expressing gratitude humbles you. And that’s when I realise that there is so much for me to be grateful for! It is not riches or travel or food or even things that make me happy. Just the ordinariness of life is abundance enough.
So every morning when I get up I Thank God that I’m alive to see the new day. Every night I express my thanks for the day gone by ( yes even if it is not my dream day).

Positivity attracts positivity and I realise now, why we need to have a World Gratitude Day. Because the positive energy generated by all those grateful souls on that day will create more momentum for more happy things to happen.

I’ve put up this post rather late in the day, but I did express my Gratitude to the Universe yesterday on #WorldGratitudeDay!

Sharing this with Corinne on #FridayReflections

Ciao