Celebrating Ganesh Chaturthi In My School

For the past 11 years, my school has been celebrating Ganesh Chaturthi with great faith, devotion and joy.

Even this year our school brought, Lord Ganesh’s idol and celebrated the festival for a period of 11 days. The idol was installed in the school auditorium. Students from pre-primary, primary and secondary sections offered prayers three times a day and celebrated the festival with a lot of activities and fun.

There was an eco-friendly Ganesh idol making competition for students of the higher classes. The younger children painted their sheets with colourful images of the Lord Ganesh. Around 1300 students of my school were involved in the celebration and everyday two classes would decorate thalis for the prayers.

My school believes that the main aim behind celebrating the festival in school is to teach us religious tolerance through celebration of different festivals in a year. According to me celebrating such festivals helps in inducing feelings of secularism and respect every individual irrespective of his caste, creed and colour. Moreover, our culture and tradition has certain fundamentals that help us to spread values and morals.

By seeking blessings of almighty Lord Ganesh, we tend to perform better in life, as there is a lot of positivity in and around us. Moreover, celebrating the festival in school spreads peace, unity, goodwill and love among students.

The small children performed poojas and sang prayers to the Lord. Our class teacher once explained that early religious values teach us to treat everyone equally and to multiply kindness and compassion for each other. With celebrations of such festivals, we teach to be good to everyone. This helps us to be better individuals and future patrons of society.

The highlight of this year’s event was the last day when visarjan took place. Sweets like modakas and pedas were made and distributed throughout the school. Special prayers were offered. Vedic hymns were also chanted by the students of the school along with the dignitaries. We the students of class IXth put up a lezim performance before the procession and teachers played Gujarati folk dance ‘garba’, to offer farewell to Lord Ganesh.