My Ganesha is better than yours

“damn right its better than yours,

I could teach you, but I have to charge

My Ganesha brings all the boys to the yard…

La la la la”

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I’m done. 

So this past Wednesday was Ganesh Chaturthi, a festival that I’ve never heard of before, but apparently is a big deal to Mumbaikers/Maharashtrians/any place where the Shiv Sen is taking over.

The city has been in festival mood for the past 10 days.  All over town every little community has set up these makeshift mandapas with fancy Ganesh statues.  Naturally each community tries to make sure that their Ganesh statue is bigger and brighter than their neighbors.  I’d comment on how immature this is, but its really not very different from the “friendly” neighborhood competitions around Christmas time in American suburbs for the most ridiculous lighting decoration involving very tacky angels, Santa and Jesus.  

Anyways so when on Ganesh Chaturthi day , two very important things happened:

1.  Everyone paraded their Ganesh idols in the street while making their way to some body of water (dancing and blasting illegal fireworks along the way) to dunk the statue in with the help of cranes (and in the process release untold quantities of highly-toxic chemicals and lead into the water that virtually guarantee birth defects for generations to come).

2.  I got the day off from work

So on my way to dinner yesterday, I took some pictures and video on my iPhone.  All the poor quality imagery is mine, the rest is stolen courtesy of Google Image.

Honestly, some of these guys weren’t the worst dancers in the world(meaning they were all better than Justin fucking Bieber).  I saw some of them doing some mildly amusing form of break dancing on the streets. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And then I found this.  Quite possibly the cutest, most pointless video ever made.

 

PS. A little status update on the Commonwealth Games. When I last posted a footbridge had collapsed.  Since then a roof has collapsed, Canada has floated the idea of cancelling the games, and the BBC started carrying pictures of the athletes village with turds in the sink.  Meanwhile the Delhi Chief Minister has assured us the “best ever games".  The silver lining to this mess is that India has accomplished something that neither the UK, Canada, Australia or any other commonwealth country has ever been able to do – get the US media to pay attention to the Commonwealth Games.