Ganesh Mandals Should Promote Innovation, Startup & Entrepreneurship Culture during Ganesh Festival

In the year 1893, Lokmanya Tilak publically installed bhagwan Ganesh’s Murti in pandal to restart the public celebration of Ganesh festival in Pune. His primary objective was to get people together on a common platform for promoting nationalistic feeling amongst them so that our freedom struggle can be logically taken forward.

Over last 120 years, this festival has grown mega-folds and now we have lakhs of registered and unregistered ‘Ganesh Mandals’ across the country celebrating Ganesh Festival annually with involvement of crores of people. I being a Puneite and that too lived in one of most traditional areas of Pune like Narayan Peth and Laxmi road for more than 30 years, undoubtedly Ganesh festival is inseparable part of my life. As a kid, I use to wait for it very eagerly for months and even now, if I am not in Pune during the festival, I really feel very disheartened and missing out on something very important. I am quite sure that majority of my readers will able to relate to my feelings.

Decorating the Mandir and bring Ganesh Murti home is an experience in itself. Moreover, on Ganesh Chaturthi, I often use to get into argument with my younger brother over who will do the ‘pran-prathisthan’ or the first pooja and my parents always had to intervene. Also, I always felt that my parents were biased towards by younger brother as majority of the times, he used to be the winner. First five days were always enjoyable as we had guests but on 5th day, immediately after the Visarjan, the real fun use to start as I use to venture out at night along with my friends to see Pandal decorations or as we call it as ‘Dekhawa’ in Marathi by different Ganesh mandals.

We use to stand in long ques to see these dekhawas and use to thoroughly enjoy them. Twenty years back, we hardly had great animations, robotics or AR/VR technologies which now our kids enjoy daily. For us, even simple dekhawas were exciting and if some dekhawas had moving figures/objects, then we were really in awe and would watch it for long time. But knowingly-unknowingly these dekhawas made huge mental impacts on us. We got sensitized to many social evils within our society like Dowry problem, Child marriages, growing population, caste system, etc. through these dekhawas. Our Ganesh Mandals through their dekhawas educated public that we need to change, we need to evolve as better people and fight the evils in our society. Even now, Dekhawas are highlighting many relevant issues such as Swatch Bharat, Climate Change, Ladki Bachao-Ladki Padhaw, Make in India, etc.

However, moving forward, I believe that now our Ganesh mandals need to play much bigger role in shaping the public mindset considering the changing global scenario. Now, Bharat has largest number of young population in world which is also very aspirational and our Ganesh Dekhawas need to be in sync with those aspirations. As country, we are now aspiring to become 5 trillion UDS economy in next 5 years and 10 trillion in another 5 years. We are aiming to reemerge as ‘Jagat-Guru’ and reclaim our past glory. If we really wish to achieve these goals, then we need to emerge as knowledge based society and knowledge based economy and for that to happen, we need to steer the thought process of our society in completely different direction. We need to tell our youngsters to think-out-of-the-box, create intellectual Property and work on new, innovative ideas. We need inculcate within our society that news ideas need to be celebrated, appreciated and supported. We should evolve as entrepreneurs and focus on creating jobs rather than seeking jobs. We need to innovate and convert our innovations in great startups and create wealth for our country. We need to build products and solutions which people across the world can use. We need to push our society to think more futuristic and to think big and dream big. ?I believe that our Ganesh Mandals can play a very vital role in percolating these new concepts within our society. We need to tell people to ‘Think Global’.

Let me further elaborate, as Chief Innovation Officer, I meet many youngsters who are keen on doing startups but then are highly discouraged by their parents, relatives or life partners due to fear of failure. Knowingly or unknowingly, we are killing good ideas just because of fear of failure. As a result, we as society are not emerging as great problem-solvers or idea-generator and look at the western world to solve our problems. This needs to change. We need to be AtmaNirbhar!

Israel does this. In Israel, they constantly work on new ideas, appreciate failures and try again as a result now they have emerged as ‘Startup Nation’. In India, if we fail, then we are looked down upon, stigmatized and are considered as losers in life. We need to change this attitude! We need to tell our society that it is OK to take risk and as society we should support risk takers and should make every possible effort to make them successful. We need to inculcate within our society that every citizen has a major role to play in building Bharat of our dreams and I strongly believe that Ganesh Mandals through their dekhawas are capable of initiating these discussions.

Also this year, we are celebrating 75th year of our Independence and ideally 25 years back, we should have started ‘Public Manthan’ on our vision and roadmap for Bharat while we celebrate 75th year of independence. Earlier, we never thought long-term but moving forward this needs to change, we should immediately start public manthan on progress roadmap for Bharat of 2047 (or atleast roadmap for our city or our State), when we complete 100 years of independence. Here also, I believe that Ganesh Mandals through their dekhawas can start this public manthan. They should also highlight 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) set by UN, so that while we talk about growth, we also discuss sustainability and take care of our mother earth.

I hope this year our Ganesh mandals will move beyond their conventional approach and look at new themes for their Dekhwasa and other programs so that they are in sync with emerging Bharat. ?????????