festival

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Navarathri 2026

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This year we celebrated Navarathri by visiting friends and family across the bay area.

San was happy and that made me happy.

She did all the driving and logistics. All I did was match her Sari to the best of my ability and go sing in a lot of places where she was happy to sit back and listen. She also had to do most of the eating as I am allergic to lot of things. Felt bad that she had to pull this off solo..

Here are the pictures..

First the matching matching..

Once your head has stopped spinning.. you can take a look at this.. (except today, where I was not invited, made it all the other days).. The picture below is definitely prettier than the one above, without me being a “repeater drishti pottu”. This one needed the floor pose to cover up some gaps.. not all pictures were the same.. San was not happy that I kept using same backdrop in same location every day.. hope she sees this and understands why!

A gallery of all the Kolu’s and any dolls that were unique or caught my eye…(in portrait format)

Photos in landscape format..

There was a lot of enthusiasm, creativity from adults and kids in the doll displays this year! Hoe this gives you a good glimpse of our bay area navarthri visits..

We are at an age where the number of folks who don’t celebrate every year is increasing. We are all in fifties. That means previous generation is in their 80’s and 90’s. A lot of missing folks and kolus this year as well. Then again, time keeps going and they will come back the following year.

Got to learn 12 new songs and got to sing a few of them.. A separate post on that tomorrow. Have finally learned to admire Dikshidhar after all these years!

Indian festivals are amazing!

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A renewed festival season

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Last year there were no celebrations or festivities in our house. It was a year of “remembering dad”.

This year we started celebrating again with the Varalakshmi, then Krishna Jayanthi, Aavaniavittam, Ganesha Chathurthi and finally we are ending with the Navarathri festivities. Life has thrown a few curveballs in the last few months and every event ended up with memories that made it not blog worthy.

Finally getting to share some photos from those events in the blog, before we get to the kolu padis..

Let’s go one step at a time..and I made them all collages..

Food that completely covers the carb, fat, sugar ternary phase diagram..

Then there is photos I send to my mom after completing each poojai or prayer… you can see the improvement in my knee from the smile on my face after sitting down cross legged for an hour at least for each of these prayers.. This morning I managed a smile and drove to work without any additional swelling!

A few other photos (the Onam spread would have required a wide angle lens that is yet to be developed)..

Now that brings us to the Navarathri festival that needs a special post or two..

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My dad is lucky even a year after his passing - Ganga Dushera

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The previous post in this series is here..

Day 3 started early as we got a helicopter to go to Gangothri from Yamunothri.

It was a short ride. Once we got there, there were separate cars for each family. The driver told us that we will go to the hotel and then go to Gangothri as there will be traffic and it was Ganga Dusshera, an auspicious festival. We told him that we would rather go straight to see Ganga Dusshera and finish, even at the risk of missing lunch. He was nice and agreed.

We went straight from the helipad to Gangothri temple. It was a long ride and we saw fantastic views, crossed Asia’s third highest bridge and eventually he went as far as he could before asking us to get down and walk. The guide met us at the entrance. He was also a kid. He took us straight to the river, got me a bucket, had me take a bath there (we bought a towel on the way!) and we got to participate in the Ganga aarathi. This day was considered river Ganga’s birthday and it is celebrated in select states where the Ganges flows. I was told that this tharpanam on Ganga Dusshera at the Bhageerathi river was something special!

The best part was the head priest suddenly calling Sangeetha and handing her the aarathi and asking her to do arrathi for Ganga! She was standing in the edge of the river and somehow the light made its way to her!

We did a tharpanam for my dad. My FIL also got to do a tharpanam for his dad. That was nice! Once we were done, we had to walk another mile back to the car. We stopped at one of the stalls and got some food as there was no guarantee of a lunch when we finally made it to the hotel (we didn’t know when).

We were happy that we finished what we came to do that day. We made it back to the hotel. Most of the lunch was done and we scraped what was in the bottom of the buffet bowls and ate something. We were happy with Chai! My MIL wanted to rest but we wanted to see the Harshil village, which also had a military outpost. FIL decided to join us and the three of us spent an hour going around the village. Right after we came into the hotel, it poured like no tomorrow for an hour straight. Good thing we were back in the hotel and not caught in traffic on the hillsides with this downpour!

Here are the photos from this leg..

My tummy is still big after eating those once a day meals during the Varushabdheegam ceremonies… it took another two weeks and back to hot yoga to reduce it .. “a bit” (added that in case Sangeetha contests the statement!)

and a longer video of the days events..

We did have a nice dinner at the hotel and got some much needed rest. We had to wait for when our pickup would be the following morning for our next stop..

Copyright © 2012, Sundar Narayanan. All rights reserved.