My First Ganpati Away From Home

This is the first time in my life I'm celebrating Ganesh Chaturthi outside my own house.

And if you've ever done a Mumbai Ganpati, you'll know exactly what I'm missing.

That city doesn't observe the festival. It becomes it. Ten days where the whole place changes frequency — pandals on every second lane, dhol-tasha starting somewhere before you're properly awake, the smell of modaks in every building, chants of Ganpati Bappa Morya rolling down a street at midnight for no reason except that somebody felt like it. Traffic surrenders. Strangers feed you. The entire city agrees, briefly, to be one thing together.

Bangalore is celebrating too. I know it is. I've seen the decorations, heard the odd speaker.

A festival is not the ritual — it's the people you've done the ritual with every year since you were small enough to be carried to the pandal.

Take those people away and what's left is a date on the calendar and a man in a flat, scrolling through other people's celebrations.

So this year, with nobody to celebrate with, I did the only thing available to me. I sat down and actually tried to understand what I've been bowing to my whole life without ever examining it.

The form is an instruction manual

Here's what I hadn't properly considered: every single feature of that form is deliberate. It isn't decorative. It's a set of instructions, hidden in plain sight, that I've been walking past since childhood.

The large head — the instruction to think expansively. To rise above the small, temporary, irritating things that consume a day. Most of what has upset me these three months would not survive ten minutes of genuinely large-headed perspective. I know this. I just keep forgetting to apply it.

The mouse at his feet — this one stopped me. The mouse is the restless mind: darting, never still, going wherever it pleases and dragging you behind it. And Ganesha doesn't kill it or banish it. He sits on it. He rides it. The entire spiritual project isn't about destroying your restless mind — it's about becoming the one who decides where it goes.

The large ears — the art of listening. Not the polite kind. The kind that hears what's sitting underneath someone's words — the insecurity, the fear, the thing they can't quite say directly. Most of us hear sentences and miss people entirely.

The small eyes — the instruction to look inward. Small, focused, turned away from the noise of the external world. Everything I've been anxious about is outside of me. Almost nothing that would actually help me is.

The broken tusk — and this is the one I needed most this year. He is depicted as incomplete. Deliberately. Permanently.

The divine form itself is imperfect, and nobody is trying to fix it. The broken tusk is not a wound. It's part of the design.

Life will break something in you, and the instruction isn't to hide the break or pretend it didn't happen. It's to carry it openly and keep functioning anyway.

And the large belly — the capacity to digest everything. Every experience, good and bad, taken in and processed rather than stored.

That one landed hard, because I wrote a few days ago about carrying pain "in a back pocket" — folded small, hidden, never looked at. And that's exactly the wrong verb, isn't it.

Storing is not digesting. A stored thing doesn't change and doesn't leave. A digested thing becomes wisdom instead of weight.

I've been pocketing when I should have been digesting.

And then the part I only understood this year

The festival doesn't end with worship. It ends with visarjan — with taking something you spent ten days loving, decorating, feeding, singing to, and walking it into the water to dissolve.

I've done that immersion many times without once thinking about what it was teaching.

Because that's the entire point of the thing. What actually gets immersed isn't clay. It's the ego. The self, the false identity, the version of you that you've built and decorated and become attached to — walked into the water and let go of, willingly, joyfully, with a crowd of people chanting behind you.

Every year the whole city performs a mass ritual of letting go, and every year I joined in without noticing that's what we were all doing.

And this year — alone, in a flat, in a city that isn't mine — I think I finally understand it, precisely because there's nothing left to be distracted by.

I have been holding on very tightly. To Mumbai. To the man I was there. To a version of my life that isn't coming back in the shape I remember it.

Maybe that's my visarjan this year. Not a clay idol. Just the quiet acceptance that something has ended, and the willingness to walk it into the water instead of carrying it around indefinitely.

Bappa in a rented flat

So no dhol. No pandal. No crowd. No modaks made by anyone who loves me.

Just a man in Bangalore who finally read the instructions after twenty-odd years of following them blindly.

Large head — stop drowning in small things.
Ride the mouse; don't let it ride you.
Listen past the words.
Look inward.
Carry the break openly.
Digest, don't store.
And when it's time, let go of the thing you spent so long building.

Ganpati Bappa Morya. Even from here. Even alone. Even in a city that hasn't learned my name yet.

Pudhchya varshi lavkar ya.
Come again soon, next year.

Hopefully by then I'll have people to say it with.

…Tune in for next.