Twenty- five Seven

Getting ready for Ganpati

August 25, 2017

Bal Gangadhar Tilak started the tradition of bringing home an idol of Lord Ganesh or Ganpati for a ten day festival. The idea was to foster a sense of community and nationalism with skits, bhajans and motivational and spiritual discourse .

Today the celebrations have changed with political sponsorship and Bollywood colouring the idea of entertainment.

However despite the crass commercialisation , noise pollution and general lack of religious sentiment, I still like this festival.

When I was a little girl, my mother used to bring a small clay idol for my brother and me . We stopped this practice when we grew older and I always wanted to have one in my own home.

But Ganpati worship is not something to be taken lightly and my mother-in-law discouraged me from keeping one at home . Celebrating Ganesh is supposed to be a family tradition and since our family didn't follow it, she felt I shouldn't start a new custom.

Fate, had different plans though and one Diwali I was gifted a lovely little silver idol. The Universe had conspired to get me a Ganesh!

My little girls were thrilled with the little Ganesh and since then, we've been keeping Ganpati in our home. Initially we kept the idol out for 10 days . The girls enjoyed the decorating, the modaks and the singing of prayers. But once again my mother-in-law suggested we keep him only for 1 1/2 days.

For a while I wanted to stop altogether especially when the girls were away at college and left home . But Hubby Dear discouraged me from doing so.

So today we took out our little Ganesha and scrubbed him clean and kept him ready for tomorrow. Wow Dinga and Little Po will help help in gobbling the modaks !

May Lord Ganesh bless and keep you all !
Cleanliness is next to Godliness #WATWB 6

August 25, 2017
While peeing and defecating in public doesn’t seem to bother our citizens, talking about waste and waste management in particular is ‘unseemly’. Bidding goodbye to propriety and seemliness, our Prime Minister brought this topic right out into the open in his first ever Independence Day Speech as PM. Since then, Mr. Narendra Modi’s call for cleanliness from the ramparts of the historic Red Fort has inspired several ordinary citizens to clean things up.

Nagendra Agnihotri is one such person who is trying to make his semi-rural town completely waste free.

“Of late, India has witnessed thousands of cleanliness drives, from political leaders coming out onto the streets and sweeping roads to municipal bodies distributing dustbins, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan indeed has gained a momentum. But this is only half baked action, community participation will complete the other half,” says 28-year old Nagendra Agnihotri, founder of Navyakriti Foundation which is striving hard to make Uttar Pradesh’s Allahganj, a semi-urban town 100 per cent clean and healthy. A law graduate, Nagendra travelled across India during his volunteering days and what struck him was the alarming levels of waste pile up in India.

Hence he decided to make the solution to this problem, his mission. Giving up a secured well-paying job, backed by a supportive family, he initiated a waste management in his own semi-urban town. Nagendra’s Solid Waste Management (SWM) project ‘KADAM: Cleanliness Towards Prosperity’ started in 2016.

Read more about this waste warrior’s initiative here .

Waste management is a humongous problem in every country. And despite our historical and cultural bias towards re-cycling, it has become a monumental problem in India too. No amount of rag pickers and conservation workers can help unless we, the ordinary citizens start managing our waste at home.

It is important to segregate waste and dispose it off properly. This is time consuming because apart from physically segregating waste, it involves re-shaping people’s thinking.

We need more citizens like Nagendra to help make this world a better place don’t we?

I’m participating in We are the World Blogfest where bloggers share positive acts of humanity in life, in the news, or social media on the last FRIDAY of each month.

The co-hosts for this month are:

Simon Falk, Roshan Radhakrishnan, Inderpreet Uppal, Lynn Hallbrooks, Eric Lahti,andMary J Giese.

If you want to join in, click Here to enter your link and join us! Bigger the #WATWB group each month, more the joy!
Here are the guidelines for #WATWB:
1. Keep your post to Below 500 words, as much as possible.
2. Link to a human news story on your blog, one that shows love, humanity, and brotherhood. Paste in an excerpt and tell us why it touched you. The Link is important, because it actually makes us look through news to find the positive ones to post.
3. No story is too big or small, as long as it Goes Beyond religion and politics, into the core of humanity.
4. Place the WE ARE THE WORLD badge or banner on your Post and your Sidebar. Some of you have already done so, this is just a gentle reminder for the others.
5.Help us spread the word on social media. Feel free to tweet, share using the #WATWB hastag to help us trend!

Tweets, Facebook shares, Pins, Instagram, G+ shares using the #WATWB hashtag through the month most welcome.
Do you have an umbrella for a rainy day?#MondayMusings

August 21, 2017

This weekend past was about the wettest weekend of the season. Funnily enough this was the first time that the Met Department actually got it right.

Because it was so wet and dreary, I spent the major part of it at home save for one drive down Marine Drive where I saw a bunch of people walking on the promenade. They were rain lovers enjoying the strong breeze and enjoying the salty rain drops.

Seeing their obvious joy brought back memories of monsoons past when I too enjoyed getting wet in the rain. As a school girl, we took great pride in reaching school some how or the other, only to find that with just about three children in class, the school authorities had no choice but to declare the rest of the day as a holiday.

In hindsight, I wonder why we ventured to go out especially when it had rained all night long. Moreover, why did the schools not advise us to stay home on very wet days?

Whatever it was, we still had to go to school on very, very wet days. This meant a day of adventure particularly on the journey home . We had to make our own way because we didn’t even have a telephone . Besides who would/could have come to fetch us?

The bus was the obvious choice because it was the only vehicle that could make it through flooded streets. However, this wasn’t a guarantee because invariably the bus would stop half way and we had to wade home in waist high water.

But we enjoyed it, trying to avoid water splashing on us, struggling to keep the umbrella open and squishing through the flood.

One journey home that remains forever etched in my memory is when we dared to hitch hike. The driver was a kindly young man who seemed amused to see two school girls about. He put down his window and asked us to hop in, volunteering to take us as far as he was going. Alas! hardly had we got a 100 yards down the road when the car sputtered to a stop. Now it was our turn to help the good Samaritan and the two of us got out in the pelting rain and pushed the car to dry ground (a good 200 yards away), while he sat inside and steered the car!

We reached home safely however and dried off after a hot shower and cup of tea.

Today I can laugh at this turn of events but looking at the pictures of the horrendous floods my country men are facing in Bihar, Assam and parts of UP, this seems like a walk in the park!

Indeed hundreds if not millions of people are left stranded on rooftops, trees or even floating pieces of furniture. These are the lucky ones. Some have literally been washed away. An umbrella at a time like this is futile.

I hope the monsoons have been good to you wherever you are and your umbrella was good enough to keep you safe and dry.

I’m linking this post with Corinne’s #MondayMusings . Do drop in to read some interesting posts from those participating in this initiative.

Getting ready for Ganpati

Cleanliness is next to Godliness #WATWB 6

Do you have an umbrella for a rainy day?#MondayMusings