{"id":396,"date":"2007-09-15T10:01:35","date_gmt":"2007-09-15T04:31:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wokay.in\/2007\/09\/15\/vinayak-chaturthi\/"},"modified":"2007-09-15T10:01:35","modified_gmt":"2007-09-15T04:31:35","slug":"vinayak-chaturthi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2007\/09\/15\/vinayak-chaturthi\/","title":{"rendered":"Vinayak Chaturthi"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ganesh_Chaturthi\">Vinayak Chaturthi<\/a> today, and I&#8217;m slightly regretting not being in Bombay.\u00a0 A year ago, I saw a Bombay Vinayak Chaturthi for the first time, and I was absolutely blown over by it.<\/p>\n<p>Out of all the festivals I&#8217;ve seen in India, nothing manages to be one big, cooperative street party the way Vinayak Chaturthi does in Bombay. Diwali in Delhi is pretty much every family against every other family in the firecrackers stakes, Baisakhi in Patiala is a community festival only for the kids, and all the festivals in Bangalore seem to be intensely private family affairs.<\/p>\n<p>(Incidentally, this ties up with my theory of how public space is shared in Bombay, fought over in Delhi, and respected or at least treated with indifference in Bangalore. But that&#8217;s another post.)<\/p>\n<p>The biggest culture shock to a Delhiite seeing the Vinayak Chaturthi celebrations in Bombay is the trucks. In Delhi, trucks on a festival day are associated with rowdies from UP crossing the border on Holi to rape and pillage. In Bombay, trucks are filled with happy middle class families who&#8217;re dancing and generally having a blast without making a nuisance of themselves. (Well, except for the noise.)<\/p>\n<p>To give you an idea of what I&#8217;m talking about, here&#8217;s (somebody else&#8217;s) photos on the festival: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/arpana\/236230017\/\">Link<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/arpana\/236239939\/in\/set-965242\/\">link<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s Vinayak Chaturthi today, and I&#8217;m slightly regretting not being in Bombay.\u00a0 A year ago, I saw a Bombay Vinayak Chaturthi for the first time, and I was absolutely blown over by it. Out of all the festivals I&#8217;ve seen in India, nothing manages to be one big, cooperative street party the way Vinayak Chaturthi [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-society"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7AOU2-6o","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}