Pillayaar(Vinayaga) Chathurthi & Me

Recently we celebrated Vinayaga chathurthi in my home town(nothing but kanchipuram), this festival always takes me 10-12 years back down in my memory lane. I think of writing it here before it fades away from my memory.
[This flash back happens at kanchipuram, when i'm studying 8th standard. At that time, we stayed in Bavapettai Street, where we had the real great fun in our childhood, we were surrounded with a mix of people from all class(upper,middle,poor,rich).]


This festival was one of the important festivals for hindus. Ganesha was such a trendy god in india to get a history flexed with the current trends. He was such a popular god having crazy devotees to spread "ganesha-idol-drinks-milk" kind of rumours. Idols of ganesha was the most selling ones than anyother gods or toys with different variations towards current trend(recently i seen an idol in which ganesha is operating a iMac computer). Even children likes to posses the fancy ganesha idols.

In kanchipuram, you are prone to view a ganesha temple at every end or junction of the streets. Apart from spiritual benefits, these temples were utilized as landmarks, also maintains the spirit of the surrounding residents. We too got one such temple nearby to my home, which develops enormous spirit between our street guys. In the spirit of ganesha, every year we intend to celebrate the festival in a grandeur fashion, by renewing the temple, decorating it and going for a rally around the surrounding streets with the ganesh idol. Since the other street guys too think in the same fashion as how we are, they too does it all what we intend to do and this provokes a competition between us to celebrate relatively grander than the other street guys. Its no more surprise that everybody wants to stand on the top, but how well we execute does makes sense.

We never had any difficulty in lack of human resources but economically we were weak to done all these by ourselves. We used to have a managing comittee(kids level) with nearly everyone with equally balanced responsibility, there is no age or status or prestigious differences. But we used to select a overall head to conclude a strategy and to work under his direction. I was selected as head of this commitee for two consecutive years(during my 8th and 9th standard).

During my tenure, i took some steps to celebrate the function one step higher than what we had done in the previous years. In the previous years our guys used to beg around with small tin(vundial) to the people who were commuting our street, to meet all the expenses for this celebration. They worked hard and tired to collect a little money and also it affects our self-respect. So, we decided not to beg from this year onwards but to improve our financial resource.

Hence we all decided to put a donation book so that we can get a decent money from the contributors. Collection through donation book was an upcoming trend at that time. And we too copied this strategy from the successful implementation by our next street guys. And it worths it.

With a mere investment to print the donation book, we started a different kind of collection this time. And we sense people contributes comparatively more than they used to when we approached them with vundial(tin). We identified they feel proud when they are donating with a written proof. We used to have a meeting everynight at the temple to discuss about collection details. During this meeting we found most of the local donors donates by comparing the previous donors, and they want to meet their contribution with those who were in equal status with them. And this specific attitude among the donors let us to find a strategy to improve our collection further. That is, we decided to maintain different books for rich icons of our street, and we ourselves put one of the icon-name with huge amount before approaching the others. And to our expectation, with the same comparing attitude they contributed with a money to equal or dominate their status symbol. Then finally we dare the leaf which we made by ourselves for a person, to approach the same person and surprisingly we get more than or equal to what we put on the leaf for that person. Being kids, we proud for it as our wise move to play around their attitude rather feeling for this as near cheating.

With this approach we collected far more than the previous year attempts. And this great success leads us to keep the same strategy in the successive years too.

With the huge(in the kids sense) money(nothing but 1000-1500 rupees) we bought a great idol of ganesha and renewed our temple with colourful painting and decorated with thoranams(kind of flag made of palm leaf) , colour papers, made a quality prasadam and more.

Unlike previous time(where we work with neck-to-neck financial resource), we still had some money left after all our celebration and we used to fund the remaining for our street cricket team. With such a team spirit we were highly resistive to corruption, eventhough we used to show the accounts to the contributors.

I'm not too religious or spiritual but i enjoyed celebrating this particular festival in my childhood.
It involves everything as a team, our friends became closer further. After all, we end up with a great sense of satisfaction.


Some of the unusual lessons we gathered during that time were

Rich people wont behave as rich always, they were calculative at everything (may this habit let them being rich).
Poor people were emotional and spirited to contribute more (may this habit let them being poor).