Happy Ganesh Utsav

I missed posting on Ganesh Chaturthi this time. I was in Mumbai last Monday. Tuesday evening was when I foolishly decided to make my way to Pune from Mumbai. As a matter of practical importance, I made the proper offerings to Ganesh, the Remover of Obstacles, before I embarked on my journey. After all, Mr Ganesh was around in the vicinity seeing as it was his time for his annual visit. So what happened? Well, I’ll tell you. Shri Ganesh failed miserably in removing obstacles from my path.

{Image above stolen from some website.}

Here’s what happened. It took about 2:30 hours to get from Mumbai to the outskirts of Pune (around 150 kms) and then it took 4 hours — I kid you not — to travel the last 24 kms to my place! What happened was that there was an amazing rain storm around 5 PM in Pune which dumped gazillion amounts of water onto the Pune streets which resulted in flooding. Traffic was backed up for miles. It was a disaster.

Ganesh, as the remover of obstacles should be fired if this is what removing obstacles amounts to. Saying that his performance is below par does not even come close to it. Anyway, I am not one to hold grudges. All is forgiven. Mr Ganesh can have a nice visit but I would be very careful to do the job of removing obstacles properly the next time if I were him. It’s a matter of reputation, you know. Once your reputation is shot, it is very difficult to recover.

OK, here’s one picture of Ganesh dancing to some cool tune. Enjoy.

Have a happy Ganesh Utsav.

Previous Ganesh posts: Happy Ganesh Chaturthi 2007, and 2006.

A couple of education related TED videos

Richard Baraniuk: Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning. (Filmed Feb 2006)

Jonathan Drori: Why we don’t understand as much as we think we do. (Filmed Feb 2007)

[Thanks to Manish Dharod for the links.}