Pages From Her Diary

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, scroll...