Its quite a fun...

May be I donno till now what the various little things symbolize, but we did go out for shopping everything needed.. Incense sticks, flowers, mango leaves, some kindda grass (no, no, not the smoking one!), the Ganesha idol, and yes of course, the fruits - five kinds, and the sweets.. a bit of running around to locate all these.. and home in 2 hours!

The rest of the stuff had already been arranged by the better half.. cotton garland, camphor, kumkum, gulal, turmeric, rice, incense stick stands, electric lamps, and what not.. How can I forget the script printouts of the main chants.. it was the first time, right? (Well, Google is great!)

Finally, we were home.. with the idol.. initial time flew past in preparing the area for placing the idol.. decoration with electric lamps.. setting all up with textbook precision.. all geared up for the launch!

Though I tried my level best to understand the 128 bit encrypted chants which were in a language i was not very comfortable with.. The pooja went well.. ending with the great moment of tasting (gobbling up would be a better word) the sweets.. Something was missing.. about which I was soon enlightened.. the tradition to have hand made sweets for offering to the almighty besides the ready made ones.. I guess no pains, no gains, was applicable here too.. in any case this was a good news.. a wonderful opportunity to give him some competition on the belly size.. before I could realize, we were churning out some coconut and jaggery based mini-fat-bombs, I mean the modaks! (I always wonder why all sweets taste so good!)

Time to pump in some calories.. mind it.. this is different from the fat-intake ritually followed on the festivals.. A sumptuous lunch was the one to push us to low-power standby mode..

Another round of pooja in the evening.. waking up to another one the next day morning.. this time with realtime streaming from the internet hooked on to the home theater system.. (waking up the lousy lazy neighbours actually).. and a final replay in the evening before it was time to conclude.. God Ganesha finally took to the water (in a bucket) with a bit of fan-fare.. a goodbye and invitation to early home coming next year as the physical form gave off and blended with water.. Its quite a fun.. do try this at home! :)