Eco-friendly clay Ganesha idol
Eco-friendly clay Ganesha idol
Shadu mati softens within hours; plaster of Paris sits on the lake bed for years and takes its paint with it. The older practice, and the kinder one.
Wellness
Ganesh Festival
Modak that is steamed, an idol that dissolves, colours that wash off skin - the festival, kept kindly.
Ganpati Bappa Morya.
For ten days the house fills with people, sweets and smoke, and that is exactly as it should be. This page is about the small choices inside the festival - the ones that decide how everyone feels on the eleventh day, and what the lake looks like in October.
## Modak, steamed rather than fried
The ukadiche modak is a steamed dumpling: rice flour, fresh coconut, jaggery. Fried modak is a modern shortcut. Steaming asks for nothing but a steamer plate and ten minutes, and jaggery carries iron and minerals that refined sugar has had taken out of it. It is still sugar - eat it like a sweet, not like a health food.
## An idol that goes back to the water
Shadu mati - river clay - softens and disperses within hours. Plaster of Paris does not: it sits on the bed of the lake for years, and the paints that go with it carry heavy metals into water that people and animals use. A clay idol with natural colours is the older practice, not a new rule.
## Colours that come off
Synthetic rangoli powders and some festival colours are sold for brightness, not for skin. Children put their hands in them for ten days. Herbal and food-grade colours cost a little more and wash out of both the doorstep and the child.
## The air in the room
Incense, camphor, oil lamps and a full house in September: the air indoors gets genuinely heavy, and it is hardest on anyone with asthma. Open two windows on opposite walls for ten minutes an hour - that does more than anything you can buy. A filter helps in a closed room; it is not a substitute for the window.
## And the eleventh day
Anant Chaturdashi is 25 September this year. However the days are kept, the part worth carrying forward is the one that was there before the sweets: everyone in one room, eating together.
Products
Modak mould and steamer set
Modak mould and steamer set
Ukadiche modak wants a steamer plate and ten minutes. The moulds make the shape without the practice most of us no longer have.
Organic jaggery (gur) blocks
Organic jaggery (gur) blocks
Jaggery keeps the iron and minerals refining strips out of sugar. It is still a sweet - this is about which sweet, not about eating more.
Fine rice flour
Fine rice flour
The outer shell of a steamed modak is nothing but rice flour, water and salt. Finely milled flour is what stops it cracking.
A2 cow ghee
A2 cow ghee
Ghee for the modak, the naivedya and the lamp. A fat the Indian kitchen has cooked with for a very long time, used in the amounts it always was.
Herbal rangoli colours
Herbal rangoli colours
Children put their hands in the rangoli for ten days. Food-grade and herbal powders wash out of both the doorstep and the child.
Brass puja thali set
Brass puja thali set
Brass outlives every disposable version of itself, which is the whole argument for it. Wash, dry, put away, use again next year.
Pure camphor (kapur) tablets
Pure camphor (kapur) tablets
Pure camphor burns to vapour and leaves no ash. Ventilate the room while it burns, whatever you are burning.
Dry fruit gift box
Dry fruit gift box
The thing you hand to the family who visited. Nuts and dates instead of a kilo of mithai, and it keeps until someone wants it.
Home visarjan tub
Home visarjan tub
A clay idol dissolves in a bucket at home, and the clay goes to the tulsi pot. No queue, no lake, nothing left behind.