With families across the state coming together to celebrate Gowri-Ganesha habba, doorways decorated in flowers and banana thoranas, and a carefully selected Ganesha and decked up Gowri ready to be given pride of place, old memories are bound to come rushing back. From gorging on obbattu, kajjaya, and modaks to planning elaborate decorations for their favourite ditties, Kannada celebs too take a trip down memory lane.
In the Shivamogga region, each house has Gowri but there’s only one big Ganesha set up in the temple. We create different ‘mantapas’ (canopies) for Gowri every year and there’s a huge competition to make the best one. I used to help my grandparents decorate ours with colour paper, balloons, lights, flowers, even fruits. This year, we’re planning to go back to our village and I’m looking forward to eating banana kajjaya, a festival specialty shaped like a modak with a bitter-sweet flavour.
As Kannadigas but also Maharashtrians, Ganesha Chaturthi is the most important festival in my family. We plan everything weeks in advance – the decorations, theme, and elaborate menu with different types of sweets, and of course, the aarti and visarjan. Each year, I look forward to it and love planning this tradition that’s been going on for generations. As a kid though, all I would look forward to were the modaks, obbattu and motichoor laddu. I was very strictly told not to touch the sweets before the pooja was over but I was so tempted, I’d slowly go and take them from the side.
We were a group of 15 boys who had formed ‘Sri Vinayaka Geleyara Balaga’ and we would start saving our pocket money for the next Ganesha Chaturthi a week after that year’s celebrations. We would get materials and make our clay Ganesha, ‘chhapra’ (canopy) and decorations ourselves. When we started earning, we went all out and with the neighbourhood’s contributions, installed a huge Ganesha. I participated in the orchestra and the dramas we arranged. Looking back, I think that may have been the spark for me becoming an actor.
I grew up in Army quarters and my fondest memories are of collecting money from houses to install a ‘bappa’, but most of our money used to go into chocolates! I also used to be very careful about not looking at the moon because it is inauspicious. But somehow, my older brother would trick me into looking and I would have to stay up all night and do a ‘jagarana’ to make up for it. As an actor, I can’t celebrate like I used to but I’m going to festival events that fans have invited me to – charity events that I’m proud of them for doing.
My most cherished memory from childhood is going to the shops along the Lalbagh West Gate to the JC Road stretch to pick our Ganesha. The idols in different designs and themes, especially the bigger ones, were mesmerising to me as a kid. Choosing the one for our house felt like an experience by itself. The visarjan, though, always felt like a sad moment. I hold all these beautiful moments close to my heart.