I was standing on a beach in western Mumbai, on the edge of the Arabian Sea, just me and about a million other people. Now, please note that when I use the phrase “about a million other people,” I’m not using it loosey-goosey-like just to make you think, Wow, there sure were a lot of people there. No, I mean there were truly a million other people on the beach. What were we doing there? Enjoying a little fresh sea air? Taking a refreshing dip in the crisp, clean ocean? Not even close. We were there to celebrate the final day of Ganesh Chaturthi, the annual ten-day Indian festival that honors Ganesh, aka Ganapati, the big-bellied, elephant-headed, mouse-accompanied god that Hindus revere as the lord of learning and the remover of obstacles. For ten days, people all over India, but particularly in Mumbai’s state of Maharashtra, worship Ganesh idols in their homes and in public spaces. Then at some point—usually on the final day of the festival—they immerse the idols and leave them in bodies of water like rivers, lakes, and the sea, symbolizing the god’s departure for another year as well as the fleeting and ephemeral nature of life itself.
As you might imagine, this religious practice is not good for the water quality in India. But perhaps you’re thinking, Oh, how bad could it be—a thousand little idols left in the water? In fact, in Mumbai alone, over 180,000 idols are immersed every year, and although most of the idols are kept in households and are only about two feet tall, at least 10,000 of them—the ones that are put on public display by temples, neighborhood associations, service organizations, corporations, and the like—are significantly larger. Many stand over six feet tall, and a substantial number of them are twenty, twenty-two, even twenty-five feet high. These things, in other words, are basically elephant monsters. Add to this that the idols are generally painted (often with toxic paints), covered with glitter and other shiny materials, and adorned with garlands and other decorations of all kinds, and you can understand why the ritual of idol immersion—spectacular as it may be—has done a really serious number on the waters in and around Mumbai.
I had arrived about a week earlier and spent my time trying to see as many of the Ganesh idols around the city and learning as much about the festival as I possibly could. I had been looking forward to this final day not just since I’d arrived, but really for as long as I’d been thinking about writing this book. What would it be like, I wondered, sitting in my ergonomic office chair in a tall Boston building, to stand on an impossibly jam-packed Indian beach as groups of people dragged and carried twenty-five-foot elephant-god idols through the crowds and into the sea? Well, I was about to find out. I’d been on the beach most of the day, but during the late morning and early afternoon, the action had mostly involved small families and groups with their modest two-foot-tall idols. Interesting, sure, but not particularly dramatic. As the sun began to set in the early evening, though, the larger idols, having been paraded all day through the densely packed streets of Mumbai, started arriving at their final destination.
And so I stood on the beach, my back to the sea, maybe halfway between where the crowds started and where the ocean began, and looked back up the sandy incline to see four of these gigantic things poised at the slope’s edge, getting ready to make their ultimate journey into the ocean. The one on the far right was draped in purple robes and golden necklaces and was holding two unidentifiable objects (was that a CD balancing on his right index finger? probably not) in two of his four hands. On the far left, set back a bit from the others, lurked one that was grasping a tiny bouquet of flowers and sporting what looked to be perhaps a giant ruby necklace around his neck. The one directly in front of me was sitting on some sort of a stool or tree stump, his right knee sticking up into the air in a strange and seemingly uncomfortable position; he was backed by a huge, three-pronged, silver design that made it look like he was leaning against the top of an enormous elaborate dinner fork. The fourth Ganesh, the one directly to this one’s right, was the most striking of all. He had eight hands instead of the typical four, each holding a different item (a sword, a scepter, maybe a bow), and behind him towered five cobra heads, looking angry and eager to strike anyone who might impede their idol’s progress to the sea.
I stood and watched these things with awe. At the same time, though, I wondered how they were going to make it through the crowd to the water. We were packed together like the mosh pit at a Metallica show. I didn’t think the Ganesh idols were going to have a lot of room to maneuver through us. And then the twenty or so people who were in charge of the purple idol started bringing the twenty-foot god down through crowd. Not slowly and carefully, either. These guys had broken out into a sprint. The spectators in the idol’s way had to get out of there, and quick. Suddenly a wave of people started pushing and scrambling every which way to avoid the rushing Ganesh, and I found myself being pushed and pulled along with them. I struggled to stay on my feet, as my face was mashed up against some guy’s sweaty neck. Along with everyone else, I craned my head the best I could to get a glimpse of the idol as it was being carried past where we were standing, but my view was obstructed at best.
Before long, the crowd stabilized in its new position, people even closer to each other than they were before. And then the idol with the angry cobras started coming down on our left. The crowd, which had just pushed left, was now pushing back to the right. It was chaos. I was sandwiched between three or four other people and carried pretty much wherever they went. At this point, I was genuinely scared. I thought of the dozen or so people who were crushed to death at that Who concert in Cincinnati back in the late 1970s. If I slipped the wrong way, it could happen to me. I wondered what my body would end up looking like after being trampled for another six or seven hours. I grabbed on to the shoulder of the guy in front of me and held on for dear life.
If you’re a US citizen who is thinking of visiting India, I have the following tip for you: Do not wait until ten days before your trip to realize that you need to get a visa to visit India. Having waited that long myself (who requires visas these days—aren’t we all just one big, happy world family?), I can testify that it can be quite stressful. If someone had asked me the morning of the day before my trip what I was planning for the next afternoon, for example, I would have had to tell them: “Either I’m going on a twenty-hour flight to India, or I’ll be sitting on the couch in my living room watching Two and a Half Men reruns and eating cheese doodles.” The trauma of not knowing if my visa would arrive probably took a year off my life.
Well, it turned out that the visa arrived about eighteen hours before my flight took off, so a mere 7,600-mile and twenty-hour plane trip later, I found myself setting foot in India for the very first time in my life. I’ve been to about twenty-five countries, some of them extremely different from the United States, and I even lived in mainland China for the better part of a year once, but nothing had prepared me for Mumbai. Formerly known as Bombay (conservative political leaders changed the name in 1996), the western Indian city is one of the most populated and densest in the world, with over twenty million people living in its greater municipal area. It is both outrageously poor and incredibly rich. Delhi is India’s political capital, but Mumbai is the nation’s commercial center and home to the glamorous Bollywood film industry. But while the city’s movers and shakers are busy making multi-million-rupee deals from the back of their Ferraris, maybe 40 percent of the city’s population continues to live in slums that generally lack electricity and running water. Only a handful of cities in the world can boast more billionaires than Mumbai, but tens of thousands of children die of malnutrition in the city every year.
Wandering around the city, to get all travel-guidey here for a minute, is an experience that is both exhilarating and exhausting at the same time. The streets are filled with scenes and sounds and smells that you just don’t run into elsewhere. Some of the sights, of course, are extremely depressing—practically naked children asking for money, people sleeping in the middle of the sidewalk, human figures horribly misshapen by malnutrition and disease. Others are just surprising or captivating. Women walking around with mangoes, sweets, or buckets of yarn on their heads; the ubiquitous cows, usually accompanied by old ladies who, for a few rupees, will give you a bunch of grass to feed the sacred animals; chai sellers with their big pots of milky tea; street food vendors by the thousands frying up breads, pancakes, and all sorts of other fragrant stuff that fills the air with the smell of a thousand spices; a lady walking a monkey; a kid grinding ingredients into a bubbling cauldron of cumin-scented goo; vegetable markets; flower markets; people wearing clothes of every imaginable type and color; little kids playing marbles; a grain miller grinding up wheat into flour to sell by the bag; groups of young men enjoying games of pickup cricket in the park. It’s crazy but unbelievably fascinating. Still, though, between all the people, the cars, the noise, the pollution, and the heat, I found it hard to walk around for more than an hour or two without becoming weary and frustrated and downright nostalgic for the comforts of my hotel room and an ice-cold Kingfisher.
Unlike almost all of the other research trips I’ve ever taken, I had not been able to arrange meetings or appointments with people before I arrived in India. I had sent e-mails to a fair number of lawyers and activists interested in environmental issues, but the responses I got back, when I did get a response, were cryptic or skeptical and invariably not very inviting. Perhaps I had made some mistake in how I had approached people, but whatever the reason, I ended up in Mumbai without any real contacts. So I was sitting in my hotel room, drinking said Kingfisher, flipping through my guidebook and gazing out my window at the grand view down Marine Drive to Girgaon Chowpatty (the beach where, when last we left it, I was about to get crushed to death), when I figured—maybe I should just pay someone to show me around. Maybe that’s what you’ve got to do in India! So I located a company that puts together custom tours and asked if someone could show me around some Ganesh-related sites in return for a few thousand rupees. Bingo! Within no time, I had arranged such a tour for the next day. I took a nap and then went to a nearby bar to celebrate with a few more Kingfishers and a cigar, all of which was very pleasant until I was forced to sprint home through a torrential rain and lightning storm that left me shaken and thoroughly soaked. Have I mentioned that it was still monsoon season when I arrived in Mumbai?
In the morning, I ate the first of many half-Indian, half-Western breakfast buffets that, between all the lentils, spicy chickpea concoctions, and funny pancakes with lemon pickles and glasses of refreshing watermelon juice, would leave me at least five pounds heavier at the end of my trip than when I’d arrived. Following breakfast, I inadvertently created a small hullabaloo when I walked into the tiny “gym” (a treadmill and a stationary bike) while a Muslim woman in full conservative dress was walking on the treadmill; thirty seconds after I arrived, she stepped off the machine and left. I felt bad.
I met my guide, Vinita, a funny and extremely knowledgeable middle-aged woman dressed in a bright yellow sari, in the lobby of the hotel, and we were quickly off on the first part of our excursion, which was essentially a “best-of” Mumbai car tour. We zipped by the iconic Gateway of India arch and the exquisite Taj hotel, which was one of several Mumbai landmarks that were targeted by Pakistani terrorists in 2008 (security around the city is still tight in response—I had to go through a metal detector to get into my hotel, for example). We stopped to take a look at the Dhobi Ghat, a massive outdoor laundry where, despite what looked like complete chaos, apparently the city’s dirty sheets and clothes are rendered spotless. We also briefly visited the central train station, an incredible Victorian structure, the busiest train station in Asia and the site of the famous musical finale number in the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire.
As we sat stalled in the awful Mumbai traffic, Vinita pointed out a eunuch, who was knocking on a car window looking for money, and a couple of Jain businessmen dressed completely in white walking on the side of the road, presumably being careful not to step on any insects since the Jains believe it is a sin to kill any living being, no matter how tiny. When we passed a Zoroastrian temple, Vinita explained how nobody but the Pharisees are allowed into their temples and how it’s said that when their believers die, they are placed on a high platform where the vultures can eat their flesh and where the bones can disintegrate and fall to the ground as fertilizer. The highlight of this part of the tour was probably our walk around an ancient part of the city called Banganga, where men were bathing in a central spring that Hindus believe is an actual extension of the holy Ganges River.
The “best-of” tour over, we then got down to some serious Ganesh viewing. Walking around a south-Indian-influenced neighborhood known as Matunga, we stopped in at four or five midsized Ganesh displays that had been erected on the side of the road. Each display typically consists of a Ganesh statue set within a scene known as a mandala. These mandalas can be simple—a few paintings in the background—or unbelievably complex and ornate, like the one I saw the following day; that mandala was basically a two-story palace. Like the idols themselves, the mandalas are all temporary and will be taken down at the end of the festival. Vinita explained that because it is usually cheaper to create the mandala than to buy, decorate, and maintain the idol itself, over time the mandalas have become more spectacular while the Ganesh idols have gotten progressively smaller. Smaller, perhaps, but by no means small. Although the statues we saw in Matunga were by no means the largest in the city, they were still for the most part between six and fifteen feet high.
Because it happened to be one of the festival’s minor immersion days, our next stop was a small beach to watch the immersion of some smaller idols. Our driver let us off near a huge, popular green space known as Shivaji Park, where we paused for a few minutes to watch some guys play a game of pickup cricket. Cricket is so ubiquitous in India—among other things, there appear to be at least six cable television channels devoted to the sport—that I found myself constantly wishing I had followed through on my 2008 New Year’s resolution “to learn something—anything at all—about cricket.” From the park, we walked to the beach, where probably a couple hundred people were gathered around several small Ganesh idols, performing a small ceremony known as a puja, which involves chanting and maybe dancing or clapping and a small fire and various colored powders, as a way of honoring the god. I watched as a couple of brawny guys carried one of the idols into the water, holding the statue above their heads until they were in water deep enough that they could no longer keep the idol out, at which point they dunked it several times and let it go.
Looking around the beach, I saw what ends up happening to the idols. By the rocks on one side of the beach, away from most of the people, the ground was littered with broken pieces of the colorless figures. It was kind of sad. Vinita explained to me that when she was younger, this place had been a real beach where she had enjoyed the sand and water; now, she lamented, the beach has been ruined by the ritual.
Our last stop was the grounds of the mayor’s residence, where the city had created an artificial pond that eco-friendly believers could use to immerse their idols in a way that would not harm the environment. As I’ll talk more about shortly, many people in Mumbai have become more environmentally conscious both generally and in connection with the Ganesh festival. One step that the government and others have taken is to construct a bunch of these artificial immersion water bodies around the region and to encourage believers to immerse their idols in the pools rather than in lakes, rivers, and the sea. The pool we visited was quite small—about the size of a modest backyard swimming pool in the United States—and would only be suitable for immersing the smallest of idols. A group of maybe a dozen teenage boys in blue and yellow uniforms were manning the pool to help anyone who might come to immerse an idol, but when we were there at least, not a single idol was anywhere to be seen. The contrast with the noisy, chaotic beach scene we had just left was glaring. We talked briefly with the teenagers who reported that they made three hundred rupees a day (about five dollars) for their work, and they claimed that in fact many people had come to immerse their idols earlier in the day. I wasn’t so sure. I admired the idea of the pool and the optimism of the kids (they told me that “this way is better”). But I wondered, not for the last time during my travels, whether the highly controlled, largely sterile atmosphere that the environmentalists had set up was really compatible with the vibrant religious practice of the fervent believers who were bringing their idols to the sea.
As extraordinary religious festivals go, Ganesh Chaturthi is actually fairly new on the scene. Nobody knows exactly when people first began worshipping Ganesh during the Hindu month of Bhadra (roughly August–September), but it’s clear that the practice dates back for hundreds of years. Until the late nineteenth century, however, this worship took place primarily within the home. It was not until 1893 when Bal Gangadhar Tilak, an activist for Indian independence and a member of the Indian National Congress, took the holiday public as a way of bringing the citizens of Maharashtra together (he himself was from Pune, a city not so far from Mumbai) in opposition to British rule. He began the tradition of installing large outdoor idols of Ganesh for people to worship publicly, as well as the tradition of immersing the idols in public water bodies at the end of the festival. With his support and encouragement, the festival grew substantially in the state over the following decades and even spread beyond into other areas of the country and the world.
Only in recent years, however, has there been any concern about the festival’s environmental impact. For one thing, scientists have recently started studying the effects of idol immersion on water quality. A group of researchers in Bhopal, for instance, studied the effect of Ganesh immersions on a large lake used for potable water supplies and found that the practice significantly increased lead and mercury concentrations there. Another study demonstrated that the immersion of Ganesh idols in the Tapi River in the state of Gujarat had led to “major changes” in oil, grease, alkalinity, and other pollutants. The study found that “the plaster of paris, clothes, iron rods, chemical colors, varnish and paints used for making [Ganesh] idols deteriorate water quality” and enigmatically concluded: “No one can stop these religious activities but awareness [of] the people and society can reduce the pollution.” A third study found similar effects in a lake in the southern state of Hyderabad. These studies, and perhaps others as well, have led the nation’s Central Pollution Control Board to conclude that “in addition to silting, toxic chemicals used in making idols tend to reach [sic] out and pose serious problems of water pollution. Studies carried out to assess deterioration in water quality due to idol immersion reveal deterioration of water quality in respect of conductivity, bio-chemical oxygen demand and heavy metal concentration.”
Science is one thing, but activism is something else, and recently, several legal and environmental activists have taken actions to address the environmental problems posed by idol immersion. One such person is Bhagvanji Raiyani, one of India’s top public interest lawyers. Raiyani, who is in his seventies, and his organization Janhit Manch, have brought scores of so-called public interest litigations (PILs) and have won many of them. The group’s success is quite a remarkable record, given the difficult issues Raiyani has taken up—corruption, education reform, and reform of the judiciary, among others. In 2002, Raiyani turned his attention to water pollution and filed a PIL in Mumbai seeking a ban on the practice of idol immersion. Raiyani’s argument was based not only on legal authority, but also on religious authority, which makes the PIL different from anything we might see here in the United States. According to the Bombay Supreme Court, “The petitioner has taken us to various religious scriptures to [show] that the immersion of idols in river cannot be justified on any count. . . . He also contended that Ganpati Bappa, so merciful and kind will hate a [puja] destroying marine life.”
In its 2008 opinion, the High Court refused Raiyani’s invitation to declare what the Lord Ganesh would or would not hate: “This Court will not be in a position to decide about what a religion permits and what a religion does not permit.” On the other hand, the court did recognize that the question of how to manage a conflict between religious practice and environmental protection is a difficult and sensitive one. In a passage that could perhaps be used as an epigraph for this book, the court noted that “the public sentiments and the public interest sometimes do not go hand-in-hand and at times it is found difficult to reconcile between [the] two and it is always necessary in such situations that the Government handle the matter in a way which would ultimately serve the public purpose.” In response to Raiyani’s petition, the government conceded that “nobody can justify the pollution of atmosphere or of water bodies,” but claimed that it was currently developing immersion guidelines that would help alleviate some of the more dangerous effects of the practice. The court was satisfied with the government’s representation and disposed of the petition, but it made clear the following: “We expect that the Central Government will consider laying down of guidelines for immersion of idols. . . . Both the Union Government as well as the State Government shall consider it expeditiously because the time lost involving the pollution might prove dangerous for [the] environment of the country in [the] long run.”
The government stayed good to its word. Within a couple of years, both the Central Pollution Control Board in Delhi and the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board in Mumbai issued guidelines for celebrating the Ganesh festival in an environmentally friendly fashion. The guidelines encourage the use of nontoxic colors for painting the idols, natural items such as “Nariyal, Supari, Thread, Leaves, Flowers, Milk, Curd, Honey, Ghee, Gangajal” in the puja ritual, and smaller-sized idols. The recommendations also call for a public awareness campaign to educate people about the ecological risks of idol immersion and urge the removal of decorative materials like flowers, jewelry, and clothing prior to immersion.
Finally, the guidelines encourage the use of clay idols over those made with plaster of paris. This last point is particularly important. Ganesh idols were originally made out of clay, an all-natural substance that dissolves in water and causes no negative environmental effects. But clay idols are heavy, difficult to make, fragile, and expensive. As a result, sculptors prefer to sell idols made out of plaster of paris, a much lighter, cheaper, easier-to-use, and more durable substance that happens to be a lot more dangerous for the environment. Many who want the Ganesh festival to be greener have urged the use of clay idols, and these activists have indeed persuaded some sculptors and worshippers to re-embrace clay. On the other hand, many celebrants are resistant to clay idols. Not only is it impracticable to make a large idol out of clay (much less drag such a heavy thing through the streets of Mumbai), but the increased cost would make it more difficult or even impossible for many poor families to buy an idol. This latter concern, as I’ll talk about more at the end of the chapter, is significant from an equality and religious-liberty perspective. There is no reason why only people with financial means should be able to participate in a religious ritual.
Crucially, both the national and the Maharashtra guidelines take the form of suggestions only. They do not impose any requirements or prohibit anyone from doing anything. Given the popularity of the immersion ritual and the sensitive religious character of Ganesh worship, it is not surprising that the government did not try to regulate the practice through actual legal rules. A few areas around the country, however, did try to go further. The state of Gujarat may be the most prominent example. There, the state’s Forest and Environment Department prohibited the use of plaster of paris for making idols: “Idols should be made from natural materials as described in the holy scripts.” The state also prohibited the “use of toxic and non-biodegradable chemical dyes for painting idols.” The experiment did not last long. A large group of idol makers challenged the ban before the National Green Tribunal, which found in their favor. Among other things, the court found that only the central government, and not a state government, could issue legal prohibitions or restrictions on the use of certain materials in idol making.
The day after my tour with Vinita, I headed out on my own to the Khetwadi District of the city, maybe a forty-five-minute walk from where I was staying and one of the undisputed Ganesh hot spots around town. I had read that the district contained twelve small parallel lanes, each of which had its own unique idol. Some of the Khetwadi idols—particularly the ones in the eleventh and twelfth lanes—were among the largest, most extravagant, and most famous in the entire country, attracting tens of thousands of visitors every day. I probably should have just taken a taxi from my hotel, but when I looked at the map, it seemed easy enough to get there by foot, so that’s how I set out. Ha! Once I left the main drag, the bewildering chaos overwhelmed me, rendering me hopelessly lost and somewhat concerned that I was having a stroke. After a while, I found a little space to take a breather on a corner next to a cow, when a man noticed my distress and pointed me in the general direction of where I wanted to go, and a little sweaty wandering later, I finally found my destination.
I spent the next couple of hours going from lane to lane, viewing with awe this incredible set of magnificent Ganesh idols. Even though the statues all depict the same god, each one is wonderfully different. The idol at the ninth lane, for instance, was advertised as being eco-friendly and was relatively small (maybe five feet tall), made of clay, and posed in a bucolic, natural setting. The seventh-lane idol was displayed inside a simple, dark room glowing with blue light; the Ganesh itself was sitting on a giant scepter, holding a small spear, and looking upward. At the eighth lane, which inexplicably sported some sort of weird Disney theme, a long entry corridor leading to the Ganesh itself was lined with little creepy figurines—a wide-eyed Minnie Mouse out of a bad acid trip; a tiny, screaming, blue cat. The Ganesh itself—pinkish, modestly sized, holding a fan in one of its left hands—was not Disney themed at all, unless its giant ears were supposed to be reminiscent of Dumbo.
The atmosphere in and around these Ganesh displays was more like a festive celebration than any kind of solemn worship—more like a New Year’s Day parade than an Easter service. The streets around the parallel lanes were filled with food hawkers and an occasional person covered head to toe with colored powder, but for the most part, life was going on as usual—women were carrying buckets of combs on their heads, men were moving around long metal pipes, a teenager sported a shirt reading YOUR FACE, MY ASS, WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE? Visitors take off their footwear before going in to see the Ganesh idols, resulting in really dirty feet and a lot of worrying about whether one’s $145 Birkenstocks, which one should have left in the hotel and replaced with a $2 pair of flip-flops, were still going to be there upon exiting (they always were). Some of the more popular idols had long lines of people waiting to get in, although for a small price, and a little bit of shame, it was possible to circumvent the line. For example, at the eighth-lane idol—the Disney-themed one that was displayed behind a facade of an elaborate castle—I noticed that some people were paying twenty rupees (maybe thirty cents) to bypass the long line, so even though I felt like a jerk, I paid the money and went right in.
The eleventh-lane Ganesh is one of the most famous in the entire city. A few years earlier, it had hit forty feet tall, the largest in the history of the festival. When I was there, it was only twenty-eight feet high (the government had urged idol displayers to keep the size of the idols down somewhat, and it seemed that the advice had stuck a bit), but it was still allegedly the tallest idol at the festival. The line for the eleventh-lane idol was really long, much longer than at the eighth-lane idol, but still reeling from the guilt of bypassing that line, I decided to save my thirty cents and wait with the masses. That was super fun! I waited for over an hour, crammed in with a sea of people whose sense of personal space is, let’s say, not quite as expansive as my own, watching those who paid their thirty cents breeze freely by us, before finally making it in to see the Ganesh.
But whoa, was this some Ganesh!? Displayed under an elaborate, multicolored, oval dome, the gargantuan elephant god was standing on something that looked like a pogo stick, its right knee raised up almost to touch the lower of its four right arms, the left knee bowed out to its left, the trunk hanging down below the lowest of the idol’s four left arms, the one holding a tiny shield. In front of the Ganesh, and below it, crouched the fiercest mouse in Mumbai. Every Ganesh has its accompanying mouse sculpture, usually a little friendly looking guy, but this rodent was immense and dressed to kill—wearing only a loincloth and grasping a fearsome spear in its right hand, its left hand balled into a fist, this guy was seemingly ready to punch in the throat anyone who might get past its sharp, bared teeth. I don’t know why anyone would want to try to harm an eight-armed, bejeweled elephant god, but it looked like this twenty-eight-foot one wasn’t taking any chances.
The only Ganesh that I saw during my stay in India that might have eclipsed the grandiosity of the eleventh-lane idol was the one at the twelfth lane. This one too is famous throughout India, and indeed the year I was there, it won, for the fifth time, the award for best idol in the city from the Times of India. Although the idol itself was fantastic—it was sitting, its lower body draped in orange, four arms rather than eight, but covered with beautiful jewels and multicolored fabrics of all kinds—the real attraction here was the setting. The sponsors had constructed an elaborate and enormous two-story palace that must have been forty feet tall. Royal blue walls were graced with golden arches through which a soft purple light glowed. Majestic chandeliers hung from the gilded golden ceiling. Worshippers enter into a narrow mezzanine at about eyeball level of the Ganesh, who sits in a giant throne in the middle of the palace. The mezzanine ends at a staircase that takes you down to the ground level, where the crowd gathers to pay its respects to the idol and also take the idol’s picture. There is a mouse, of course, but unlike the eleventh-lane squeaker, this one was silvery and happy looking and holding the mandala’s red powder in its little paws. I smiled at the mouse, collected my Birkenstocks, and took one of Mumbai’s famous door-less trains—fewer doors means more people can scrunch in, which is good, even if once in a while somebody falls off the train and dies—back to my hotel and yet one more (okay, three more) ice-cold Kingfisher(s).
Here are some of the festival-related stories that were making news during the week I was in Mumbai:
• A famous Bollywood movie star was offered twenty million rupees (over forty thousand dollars) to make a thirty-minute appearance at a Ganesh idol in the state of Gujarat. Bollywood actors often receive money to make appearances with the idols, but this was an especially large amount of dough.
• Two members of a Ganesh mandala in Mumbai employing loudspeakers at 12:15 in the morning assaulted a police officer who was attempting to enforce a noise ordinance. According to the Times of India, “this incident shows how lawless a section of mandalas have become. Years of cops looking the other way and refusing to clamp down on noise-norm violations, combined with the arrogance bred by political patronage, are responsible for this situation.”
• Some person or organization concerned with city traffic erected a large sign on a prominent part of Marine Drive declaring: MUMBAI DESERVES BETTER ROADS. LORD GANESHA ARE YOU LISTENING?
• A video showing several men who tended to the most famous idol in all of Mumbai harassing women went viral on social media and sparked a public response from the state’s home minister.
• On one of the early immersion days of the festival, at least thirty worshippers were bitten by stingrays at the main Mumbai beach. A dozen were taken to the hospital for treatment. Signs immediately went up warning immersing celebrants to be careful.
• With the forecast showing rain for the big immersion day, a lot of talk centered on how to protect the idols as they made their way to the sea. Large plastic sheets were to be the preferred method of protection. As it happened, it did not rain on the immersion day at all.
The most famous idol in all of Mumbai, the one where the workers were caught on camera harassing female visitors, is the Lalbaugcha Raja, or Lalbaug, which is so renowned for its purported power to grant wishes that well over a million worshippers visit it every day of the festival. I had heard that it would take several hours of waiting in a serpentine line to get in to see the idol, and I had no interest in doing that. I did, however, want to check out the neighborhood, which contained many other idols, some famous in their own right, as well as just a lot of festival-related excitement and activities. Having had success with my first tour, I arranged another one with a different company to visit the Lalbaug neighborhood.
My guide arrived at the hotel late and wet, drenched by the rain and delayed by the trains. Maybe five feet four inches tall, with long, slender fingers and a bushy gray beard, he appeared decidedly guru-looking. He introduced himself as Ramanand, and as we jumped into the smelly car provided by the tour agency, he explained that he was a former union laborer turned sustainable farmer turned guide-follower of a true Indian spiritual leader-Waldorf schoolteacher. By the time we made it to see our first Ganesh, he had already launched into a complicated lecture on the relationship between spirituality, ecology, and sustainability—a speech of which I followed maybe 16 percent.
I did, however, understand his view on the Ganesh festival (and other Hindu immersion festivals), which he finds, in its current incarnation, hollow and environmentally dangerous. As he explained, in the beginning, one can imagine parents teaching their children about the impermanence of life by making a little clay figure of a god, covering it with flowers, worshipping it for a while, and then putting it into a nearby pond where it could dissolve right back into the earth where it came from. But now that people have moved to the cities, they use resources from elsewhere to build and decorate their idols and then put the idols into water far from away from the material’s real source, thus linearizing the process, breaking the cycle of life, and rendering the whole practice unsustainable. The festival worries him greatly. He called it a “blind ritual” that many people follow out of fear that if they stop doing what their family has done for years, they will suffer. “We’re god fearing,” he said, sadly. “Not life loving.” Later, when I asked him over lunch whether I would see anything spiritual the next day during the big immersion festivities, he pretended to drink from a bottle, glug glug, and said, “Oh, there will be spirits all right—but that’ll be the only spiritual thing about it.”
After a quick trip to a big Ganesh in the main tourist area of the city, where Ramanand took my picture patting the toe of the idol, which I learned is something that one is supposed to do when visiting an idol, we made our way to the ultrachaotic part of town surrounding the famous Lalbaug Ganesh. A quick check with the police managing the line at the idol revealed that the wait to see it would be at least two-and-a-half hours, so we set out to see some other things instead. We visited a sculptor who was busy working on a bunch of idols of the goddess Durga for the next Hindu festival. At one point I mentioned to Ramanand that I was hoping to pick up a little Ganesh idol of my own to take home with me, meaning that I would try to find one in a store somewhere. The next thing I knew, he had arranged with the sculptor to bring me up to the top floor of an old building where I was suddenly surrounded by two-foot-tall Ganesh idols and urged to pick out a nice one. I settled on one who was holding an orange and sitting on a big leaf, because it seemed kind of environmentally themed and, with the help of Ramanand, I bartered with the sculptor until he agreed to sell it to me for thirteen hundred rupees, or about twenty US dollars.
(As it turned out, getting the idol back to Boston was an ordeal. Because the idol was heavy, awkward, and easily chipped, I wanted the sellers to pack it up for me in a crate that I could readily take home. The sculptor was fine with the request, but claimed that the “carpenters are celebrating a carpentry holiday and are worshipping their tools and cannot pack it up today.” This seemed odd, but with little alternative, I agreed to have them deliver the crate to me the next day at my hotel. When the idol arrived at the hotel, it was in a cardboard box filled with newspaper and coconut fibers, hardly protective of my investment and definitely not put together with any tools that had required worshipping. To bring it home, I took it out of the stupid box and put it in a paper bag. I just carried it like a baby or a pet everywhere I went on the trip—through the security line, into the bathroom, in the backseat of the taxicab—and stored it in the overhead compartments of both my flights. I got a lot of weird looks, but now it’s here at home, sitting on the shelf behind me with its orange and watching me type this very sentence.)
Ramanand and I went on to check out a couple of the big idols in the area, including a famous giant one known as Galli. By this time, however, I had gotten pretty much Ganeshed out. So, after those two were done, I called an end to Ganesh viewing, and we headed for lunch, which consisted of delicious fish slathered in coconut gravy and some funny patties made out of the little flowers that you can find inside a banana plant. During lunch and the long car rides to and from the restaurant, Ramanand continued to spin out his philosophy of life. As long as he remained on these abstract topics, I have to admit that I zoned out a bit (I had written in my notes at this point the sentence “Saris are unforgiving, re: side fat,” so I guess I was looking out the window). But when he turned back to the Ganesh festival, I perked up.
He said a few really interesting things. For instance, he suggested that when you look at the Ganesh idols, you’re supposed to realize and understand the idea that life is change, that all is impermanent. But instead, people in Mumbai just go see the idols to check them off their list—one, two, three, four, five, see them all, have lunch, go home. He explained his view that any person or organization that makes something, like a Ganesh idol, should anticipate its destruction and responsibly provide for it, but the idol makers don’t do that, and so the festival, ironically, turns out not to be about what it’s supposed to be about. Finally, he said that one of the many names or meanings of Ganesh is “the remover of obstacles.” But, Ramanand explained, “look how many obstacles this festival has put up to getting around the city.” When I asked him finally whether he was optimistic that the festival might become more eco-friendly, he seemed to think it was unlikely: “It’s really difficult. It’s a big business, and that will typically prevail. There are a few people out there doing good eco-friendly work, but it is very hard in the face of all the money.”
The following day was the one I had been waiting for—the last day of the festival, when all the idols that had not yet been immersed would be sent to their final resting places at the bottom of Mumbai’s lakes, rivers, and seas. I had expected that things would start getting going early in the day, but in fact, the beach was basically empty in the morning (I could tell, using my binoculars from the hotel room). So I watched a bunch of live television coverage of the festival instead, as those in charge of the biggest idols started parading them around the streets through enormous throngs of celebrating Hindus.
I headed to the beach about noontime, and for a few hours, most of the action was low-key. The idols were fairly small ones, probably family-owned, and they were accompanied by coteries of worshippers large and small, some gentle, others exuberant, many of the groups all wearing the same color of clothing (and covered with the same colored powder), like teams. The group would set the idol down in the sand and do a little puja ritual, complete with some combination of fire and coconuts and bells and drumming and dancing, and then two men would bring the idol into the water and give it a couple of dunks before handing it over to some red-shirted official workers who loaded all the idols onto an orange raft. When the raft was filled with idols, maybe fifty or so, the workers would take it out—way, way out—into the sea, where presumably they threw the little guys into the water one by one (they took the rafts so far out, it was impossible to see what exactly the guys did with the idols, but the rafts always came back empty).
The scene on the beach was fascinating. Vendors made their way through the increasingly dense crowd to sell all sorts of things—cotton candy, water, balloons, chai, gross-looking ice cream bars from a big metal can. Lots of women and little kids were begging but not too persistently, though one beggar wouldn’t stop tapping my foot. Other kids were digging in the sand and making pyramid-shaped sand temples. A lot of people were out there trying to keep the place relatively clean—teams of official workers were dragging around round sled-like contraptions, collecting trash and organic materials that had been taken off the idols before immersion and then separating the trash from the organic stuff and placing them in different receptacles.
After a late lunch at a nearby famous vegetarian restaurant that claimed to have the “Veg Edge,” I headed back to the beach to await the arrival of the giant idols. For a couple of hours, I took up a great position up against a fence right at the place where the idols were arriving and just stood there and watched as bigger and bigger ones starting making their entrance. I struck up a conversation with a hip Mumbai guy named Neel who was sporting funky half-red glasses, and we talked about the meaning and origin of the festival. I asked him what the phrase was that everyone had been chanting nonstop all day long, and he told me the phrase was “Ganpati Bappa Morya,” which is a cry of praise for Ganesh. Neel and his friend had been walking around Mumbai all day taking pictures of various processions, including the Lalbaug’s, so he showed me a bunch of the incredible pictures, but the best one was the picture of his own family idol—a small one, made out of clay, with a maternal theme to honor his mother. Of all the people I talked to, Neel had the most moving perspective on the festival. As he eloquently put it: “There’s a competition for the biggest, best idol, but really, whether it’s big or small, fancy or simple, expensive or cheap, it’s all the same god.”
After a while, Neel and his friend moved on, and I made my way back into the middle of the crowd on the beach, which is where I was at the beginning of the chapter—in a sea of people, my back to the actual sea, looking up at the approaching Ganesh giants as they made their dramatic descent toward the ocean. As you may have surmised by now, I was not trampled to death by the crowd. I wasn’t even injured. But I did get pretty worried, and so after watching four or five of the idols make their way through the crowd up close, which I have to say was a breathtaking sight, I fought my way out of the densest area of the beach and out of harm’s way. Anticlimactic, I know. But what did you expect this book was going to be? Some kind of tragedy, like Into the Wild?
For a while I stood in a relatively uncrowded (read: still pretty damned crowded) place near some concession stands and watched the action from there. As the sun set over the bay, one enormous Ganesh idol after another was marched into the sea by teams of worshippers. It was as if the Rose Bowl Parade dead-ended at the Pacific Ocean but then kept on going. I tried to forget about how these things were going to end up lying on the ocean floor creating havoc in the marine ecosystem and attempted to focus instead on the surreal beauty of the scene. With the extravagant, multicolored statues marching in line through the purple sky, disappearing into the dark embrace of the sea, it wasn’t very difficult.
The next morning, I returned to the beach to assess the damage. The scene was grim, like a battleground littered with elephant god corpses, a veritable graveyard of Ganesh idols. Slabs and chunks of the larger idols were strewn about, their coconut husk threads giving them away if they happened to be stuck upside down in the sand. Lots of more or less intact little idols were washing up as well, some of them missing an ear or part of a trunk or something else. The paint on the idols’ remains had washed off, dissolved into the sea, leaving them as pale gray ghosts to haunt the shore. All around, kids were picking up the smaller idols and putting them in piles or standing them up next to each other, maybe in a circle, like a little sad seminar. I watched as one idol washed up out of the sea and landed pretty much upright, leaning against a pole with a red flag on it. The idol rested there for a minute or two before a big wave came in and hit it, causing the object to flop over unceremoniously in the mud.
I took out my camera to take a picture of a pile of the washed-up idols, but a police officer quickly put a stop to that. He came running over, giving me the signal for no way. He was friendly enough, but he was definitely not going to cave. “A picture could be used for the wrong reasons,” he told me, as I put away my camera. I considered surreptitiously taking a picture anyway after he left, but much as I would have loved to take an intensive course in the local language, I had no interest spending any time in a Mumbai jail, so I didn’t take the risk.
I wandered down to the far end of the beach, where I ran into a group of college students who were dressed in identical blue shirts and picking up trash. I struck up a conversation with one of the guys, who explained that students from the college volunteer every year to do what they can to clean the place up on the day after the immersion. When I asked him if Ganesh idols wash up onto the shore a lot, he said, “Oh yes—they are made of plaster of paris so they don’t dissolve in the water.” I told him about the cop who wouldn’t let me take the picture, and the kid was hardly surprised. “No, no, they won’t let you,” he told me. “It could become a political controversy.”
After ninety minutes or so, I left and wandered back to the hotel. The walk home was a lot quieter than it had been the evening before, when processions of Ganesh worshippers had filled the night with their ecstatic chanting and drumming and dancing and blasting of fireworks from the side of the road. This morning, there was none of that, but I did stop halfway back to watch three little kids, maybe five or six years old, tear apart a small Ganesh idol that perhaps they had made for a school project. They threw its parts—a leg, the trunk, an itty-bitty arm—into the sea, where the pieces disappeared with a series of tiny plops.
With the festival over, the next day I took a trip to Pen, a small town about three hours from Mumbai that is famous for its Ganesh idols. From what I had read about the place, it was filled with artists and sculptors renowned for their work, and idols made in Pen were said to be the best ones to have. I had made an appointment to meet with one of these famous sculptors, Shrikant Deodhar, a fourth-generation Ganesh sculptor known around the world for his idol making and, increasingly, for other types of sculptures as well. He has long been the head of the sculptors’ association in Pen, and according to his website, before he retired from the Ganesh-making business, he used to make between eight and ten thousand Ganesh idols every year.
To get to Pen, I hired a driver through my hotel, but unfortunately, nobody had quite conveyed to the driver that I actually wanted to leave Mumbai. Expecting a short job, he became grumpy upon learning that he had to spend the day driving back and forth to Pen, but a job is a job, and so he reluctantly agreed to make the journey. Once we got to Pen, however, finding Deodhar’s house wasn’t so easy. I had a cell phone number for the master sculptor, but when the driver called it and nobody answered, he got out of the car to ask directions. The effort to find Deodhar was comical. I watched from inside the car as a cow and then a woman with a can of gas on her head passed in front of me. The driver asked a guy with a rickshaw, but when that didn’t yield results, he asked a guy selling apples. But the apple guy didn’t know, so he asked the nearby banana guy, but he didn’t know either, so the driver tried asking a guy who was selling scarves and coconuts. No luck. When the driver got back in the car, saying, “Confusion, confusion,” over and over again, I asked him if he wanted to try calling Deodhar again. As it turned out, the driver had mistaken my 9 for a 4 in the phone number I’d given him, and once that was cleared up, calling Deodhar was no problem, and we found the house within minutes.
I sat with the sculptor in his white and airy living room, sipping tea and talking about the holiday. A little intimidated at first (the guy had just come back from Spain, where he had been giving weeks of workshops on sculpture making), I was quickly put at ease by Deodhar’s good humor and willingness to share his knowledge with me. He talked about his family and their long history of idol making in Pen, as well as the history of the festival. I was interested in learning what made Pen so famous and what made the town’s sculpture so desirable, but at first I had difficulty figuring it out. Deodhar explained that making a Ganesh sculpture is difficult. You start with a human body and an elephant face, which is itself kind of “absurd,” but then “you can go your own way—fat, thin, big ears, really small ears, it still looks like an elephant.” Like most of his Brahman brethren, Deodhar prefers a subtle and sophisticated Ganesh figure, one with soft colors and delicate features, one whose head looks like an actual elephant. His clients have not always shared his refined taste, though, and while it had frustrated him as an artist to produce more garish Ganesh idols, as a businessman he provided what his customers wanted, even if it involved putting the god on a tiger or a very big fish. “The fishermen want a very spicy idol,” he explained, “because they are spicy people.”
After a while, I steered the conversation toward the environment and the differences between clay and plaster of paris idols. Although Deodhar claimed to care a great deal about the environment, it was clear and not surprising that as the president of an association representing fifty thousand sculptors making plaster idols, his true allegiance runs to his fellow idol makers. He has been in the middle of the controversy between environmentalists and plaster sculptors and, after reading a report issued by the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board, believes that although plaster can block waterways, it is not itself harmful. At times during our conversation, Deodhar’s impatience with environmentalists came to the surface. For instance, at one point, he said it was a big joke among the sculptors how minor the pollution from a one-day festival must be compared with the manufacturing and chemical companies that pollute the water all year long. Another time, he told me that out of a hundred environmentalists, ninety are really marketing some environmentally friendly product or service. Only the remaining 10 percent, he said, are true environmentalists, although even among these, many are really just showing off. Ultimately, Deodhar said that he is happy when someone wants to buy and immerse a clay idol, “but if you say as a high society that you can’t sell the other type, that’s when there is going to be a fight.”
It is hard to understand the idol-making process just by listening to someone talk about it, and I honestly didn’t really get it until Deodhar ushered me into the studio where he does his work. These days, he is no longer mass-producing Ganesh idols (the administration aspect of running the business was killing his inner artist), but is instead focusing on expanding into other types of sculpture and doing a few, as he calls them, signature Ganesh idols. His studio was lined with shelves and shelves of idols, molds, and other materials, and piles of plaster powder dotted the studio’s floor. I asked him about the powder, and he explained that in India, instead of buying premade plaster, you have to buy powder and mix it up with water yourself. As Deodhar explained the many, many steps that go into making a finished idol—at least twenty-five people can be involved in making a single sculpture—I started to understand what he’d meant when he’d said that idol making is some seriously difficult work.
The first step is to create the original model out of clay. This is where the skill of the model maker can make all the difference between a beautiful work of art and, say, a piece of crap, and it’s where Deodhar himself excels. He showed me one of his models, and the vast difference between what he had made and the typical Ganesh idol like the one that I bought a few days before was immediately apparent. Most idols look like cartoon characters; his looked like a genuine elephant (albeit one with a human body and a nearby friendly mouse). Once the model is done, someone else will make a mold out of it by applying many layers of latex over the model and then skillfully removing the latex, leaving a hollow mold that can then be filled with plaster over and over to make hundreds of sculptures. Separate molds are made for various delicate parts of the idol, like the Ganesh’s hands and tongue. These separate parts are all put together to create the complete Ganesh. This, in turn, enters the finishing phase, which consists of polishing, priming, painting, adding ornaments, and, most interestingly, eye painting. According to Deodhar, the painting of the idol’s eyes requires great skill, and there are people whose job it is exclusively to paint eyes. These guys work freelance and can make good money painting a hundred sets of eyes or more every day.
We moved from the studio into Deodhar’s spacious office, which was adorned with posters from Ganesh exhibitions, some in foreign languages. He tried to turn on the lights, but when they didn’t work, he shrugged it off by saying, “This is India.” It was interesting hearing the sculptor talk about how his customers had reacted to his decision to get out of the mass-idol-making business. “People are so emotional about their Ganesh,” he said. “They didn’t want me to stop, because they’d been getting their Ganesh from my family for fifty years.” According to Deodhar, it took him five full years to transition out of the business, because people kept demanding that he provide them with his idols. Even now, although Deodhar has made sure that his customers can get idols from other master artists, he says his former clients sometimes still harass his wife, trying to get her to convince him to make them an idol. “Shrikant Deodhar,” they’ll say, “your Ganesh used to talk with us. Your friend’s idol does not.” I can understand their complaints. I’ve had my own garish Ganesh sitting behind me for months now, and although I like having him there, he hasn’t spoken to me a single time.
My week in India gave me a lot to think about. For one thing, it was clear from the situation in Mumbai that the government could not possibly institute a flat ban on idol immersion in natural waters without causing something resembling a revolution. My guess is that the most environmentalists can hope for, at least presently, is to convince the government to impose relatively minor regulations to reduce the most harmful impacts of the practice. Indeed, having never witnessed a religious celebration quite as intense and immense in scale as the Ganesh festival—particularly the final day of immersion—I was struck by just how long a road the environmentalists have in front of them. For those in India and elsewhere who are hoping for significant change, they are probably wise to keep in mind that it’s a marathon and not a sprint. Or, in other words, in some cases of extreme religious devotion and fervor, environmentalists in the government and elsewhere should recognize that change could take a long, long time and that it may be best to seek a series of small changes rather than going for too much too quickly, which could risk a backlash and ultimate failure.
The morning-after scene at the beach, where the police officer stopped me from taking a picture of the pile of washed-up, broken idols, made me think about the importance of the free flow of information. If the environment is going to get a fair shake when it suffers harm from religious practice, people are going to have to know about the existence and degree of the harm. Lack of sufficient information to make rational choices is a classic justification for regulation in a market economy—regulations requiring, for example, the disclosure of toxic releases, nutritional information about food products, and possible side effects of medications are justified on these grounds—and it justifies intervention here too. The government has a responsibility to collect and distribute information about the harms to the environment brought about by religion so that the people affected can make informed choices about how to proceed.
In the case of water pollution caused by Ganesh idol immersion, the government in India has taken steps in this direction, as evidenced by the judicially mandated reports and guidelines issued by the Central Pollution Control Board in Delhi and the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board in Mumbai. On the other hand, the government’s reaction (in the form of the cop) to me and my camera on the beach was deeply disconcerting. There, the government was not simply failing to provide information itself—it was actually stopping me (and presumably others) from collecting and disseminating information. How can the population of Mumbai decide what, if anything, should be done about the environmental damage caused by the Ganesh immersion if they are shielded from information that is extremely relevant to making that decision?
The issue that I found myself wondering about the most, however, was whether increased regulation of the Ganesh festival would have troubling, unequal effects on rich and poor worshippers. The vast difference between the wealthy and the impoverished is so vividly on display in Mumbai that it was hard not to think about the question of equality in nearly every context, including the one I had come to research. Regulation of any sort that increases the costs of an activity, even if the costs are measured in terms of difficulty of engaging in the activity rather than purely economics, is likely to impose unequal burdens on regulated parties or the people who rely on those parties. If, for example, a state imposes costly regulations on abortion clinics—say, requiring the clinics to comply with the same building and staffing requirements that surgical centers have—then some clinics are likely to close, and if some clinics close, women who seek an abortion will, in general, have to travel longer distances, spend more time, and pay more money to access a clinic. This change may have little effect on women who have plenty of time and money to go to a clinic farther away, but those with fewer resources may actually lose the ability to visit a clinic altogether.
Typically, in the environmental law context, we don’t consider the unequal effects of regulation to be a terrible problem. A regulation requiring all zinc processing plants to implement a certain type of costly antipollution technology will likely be more burdensome on smaller, less successful plants than it is on bigger, richer ones. The regulation might even put some struggling plants completely out of business, but this potential downside is often understood to be the inevitable result of regulation and, while perhaps regrettable, is usually justified by the environmental benefits of the new technology. But people practicing their religion are not like businesses making money—they are individuals expressing their most important beliefs about the world around them and are relating to their communities in profound ways. And so the government should be very wary of implementing any regulation meant to protect the environment that will allow some believers to practice their religion but not others.
This lesson is particularly relevant to the question of whether the Indian government should require that idols be made out of clay rather than plaster of paris. In some ways, this is the regulation that would best balance freedom of religious practice with environmental protection. Hindus could still worship Ganesh idols all week long, and they could even carry them through the streets and celebrate wildly as the faithful immerse the idols in the sea. But the immersion would have far fewer negative environmental effects. Clay dissolves, and as long as the idols are not painted with toxic paints, the impact on the water quality would be minimal. Although such a regulation would make it harder, if not impossible, to make and carry extremely large idols, that cost to religion (a real cost, I concede) may well be worth the environmental benefits. Likewise, although the regulation would have a serious negative effect on the businesses of many sculptors—a real problem in a place like India, where many people remain so poor—I’m still not convinced that the costs would outweigh the benefits.
The problem I worry about the most is whether requiring clay idols instead of plaster ones would make it harder or even impossible for many poor individuals and families to have and immerse a Ganesh idol of their own. Since clay is much more expensive than plaster, this requirement would raise the cost of buying an idol to such an extent that they would no longer be affordable for some families, and then the government would have created a serious problem for religious freedom. Some people—those with the financial resources—could buy a clay idol, keep it in their home, worship it, bring it to the sea, and immerse it, while others would not be able to purchase an idol at all. Of course, the government makes all sorts of decisions that have an effect on the general state of economic inequality in a country, and this inevitable inequality will make it harder for some to worship than others. But the government should not make such conditions worse by passing specific regulations that make it harder for the poor to practice their religion. When it comes to religious freedom, we should all be equal.