Chetla Agrani, the famous south Kolkata crowd-puller puja led by mayor Firhad Hakim and located few hundred metres from the Adi Ganga, has chosen to depict Ganga pollution as the theme of this year’s puja pandal.
“Why Ganga pollution” was the obvious first question, to which the mayor immediately responded: “Simply because we are trying to put across the message that unless the Ganga survives, the civilisation beside it, including the city of Kolkata, will not survive.”
Sneak preview
The message the organisers want to impart is that if the Ganga gets polluted, so does the entire society
On Thursday night, this journalist had a sneak preview of the gorgeously crafted pandal with the mayor as the guide alongside theme mastermind Subrata Banerjee in tow.
“The installation has broadly two parts. At the centre, we have shown how the clean and unpolluted water flows from the Himalayas, from Lord Shiva’s matted locks; and then in the other, how human action, both in form of industrial pollution as well domestic waste dump, is polluting the divine water. It’s strange that we pollute the same holy water that we use to offer pujas to our deities,” said Hakim.
As one enters through the main entrance within the pandal, he or she will immediately find a waste dump with all kind of thrownaway materials, including plastic bottles, sacks, discarded clothes and abandoned idols among others, within a slushy space indicating the riverbank, basically, mirroring the waste that we dump on Ganga ghats across the city and create pollution. “All these throwaway objects are from Adi Ganga and have been collected during the ongoing Kolkata Municipal Corporation project to clean up Adi Ganga,” shared the mayor. Presently, a World Bank-supported project is going on in Kolkata to clean up the Adi Ganga, the original channel of river Ganga and a major drainage channel of the city.
The waste collected from and around the Adi Ganga form a vital installation at the pandal
“The act reminds me of the waste installation created in Dhaka sometime back with the discarded materials being collected during the cleaning of Buri Ganga for creating awareness among common people, basically telling them, look, what you have done to the river,” said an environmental activist.
On the other side of the pandal flows the river with temples and ghats on its bank, Varanasi recreated, as well as showing how the industrial effluents have been hampering the river alongside smoke-belching chimneys. “We have tried to show how the river has been affected in every nook and corner of the country,” said Banerjee, who conceptualised the pandal. Banerjee also pointed out that from Saturday, regular Ganga arati will be performed on the riverside part of the pandal; in Varanasi-style.
“It’s good to see that mayor has chosen river pollution, especially that of Ganga, as the theme; and we fervently hope that the Ganga awareness and action will be carried forward beyond the puja days,” said an environmental activist.
