RANDOM AT LARGE

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32117, 13 October 1969, Page 19

RANDOM AT LARGE

THE NUMBERS GAME

Since we arrived in Bom- * bay readers will have noted perhaps that we have been rather impressed by the vast numbers of people here. There has been a tendency to become repetitive about this, as though numbers, in themselves, were important But it is difficult not to be staggered at about 3,000,000 people watching or taking part in a religious festival which contrives to draw all the branches of the Hindu belief into one, during the- 10 This afternoon was the culmination of the festival of Ganesh, a god with the figure of a boy and the head and trunk of an elephant Inquiries about the derivation of the fable of Ganesh brought different answers • from Indian friends. They both suggested Ganesh was a victim of misfortune, being killed by a god and provided with bis .elephant trunk either as a punishment or because his father, finding him dead, rushed out and killed the elephant | to provide his son with a sort of artificial respiration outfit It seems,

too, that the various branches of the Hindu faith regard Ganesh in different lights—to one he is the god of strength, to another the god of wealth, and so forth. But they all worship him, and at this time each year, an enormous parade takes place, beginning modestly and ending, as it did today, with thou/isands of effigies of Ganesh being taken to the beach to be put out in the water; the Ganges, we were told, ran through the head of ; Ganesh’s father and Ganesh has to be sent into the water, possibly to meet him. The effigies were taken to the beach from the first day onwards, but each day grew in size and splendour, and this afternoon the crowds were enormous. The worshippers were in groups—each street contributed to an effigy, and the neighbours walked together with ropes to keep out gate-crashers and they converged on a central beach point for hours. . Hundreds of thousands of ; spectators lined the streets, crushed themaelves on to balconies,

stretched out on roofs, crowded into windows. It was an enormous ant heap which had been disturbed, it is ■ joyous festival, with about half the people in the processions dancing, usually to the insistent beat of drums. An orange powdered dye, symbol of good fortune, was flung about with much abandon, the people daubing their faces with it, and turning their hair into unfamiliar hues. Yet out of what seemed chaos, the police and traffic organisers brought order the processions proceeding quite smoothly on one side of the roads, those who had completed the ceremony walking back from the sea on the other. Wave on wave of dark faces, all apparently released, at least for a time, from the rigours of existing in India. By taxing the imagination, it was just possible to relate this colourful, noisy, extravagant performance to the peace and serenity of a New Zealand back lawn on a spring afternoon; just as it is possible to accept that men have been on the moon.