Hyderabad Bids Adieu To Ganesha With Devotion

…The scale stretched from those improvised processions to the 69-foot Khairatabad Ganesh and the Balapur procession moving through the city towards Tank Bund, but the feeling at the end remained much more personal. “ Visarjan ke liye aate waqt toh khushi hoti hai, jaate waqt bura lagta hai (There is happiness on the way to immersion, but not so much when we have to go back),” said Vishnu from Asifnagar, who has been coming with his family for immersion for 18 years. This year, they came to Malkam…

…workers and called out, “Teen doobki lagao bhaiyya (Give him three dips, brother)”. Shruti, a working professional whose family was there for its fourth year of immersion, had fitted the visit into an ordinary Friday. “ Today is my working day. I took a couple of hours to come for the immersion and will go back to work after this ,” she said. The sadness of saying goodbye had become familiar to her, and she said the anticipation of Ganesha returning the following year compensated for it. The mood changed closer to the main procession route.…

…College, Basheerbagh, Liberty Junction and the Dr Ambedkar Statue area. The Bhagyanagar Ganesh Utsav Samithi had Sri Ramanujacharya Sridharacharya Maharaj from Ayodhya as the chief guest during the day’s proceedings. “ We are around six families and come together every year. We park near Liberty and stay from the afternoon until late at night. We fix the time in our family group and meet here. The best part is spending the day together and seeing the different Ganesh idols ,” said Shiva Kumar from Nagole. Food and water became part of that long wait. Social-service groups distributed snacks free of cost along stretches of the route, cotton candy and popcorn were popular among visitors,…