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By:

Rajendra Pandharpure

15 April 2025 at 7:55:54 pm

The BJP’s Ganesha Gambit

Pune’s Ganeshotsav has become an enormous civic and political stage, and the ruling party has proved adept at occupying it. Pune: The city’s Ganeshotsav is entering its final phase, but the festival has already demonstrated something beyond its extraordinary crowds and familiar spectacle: the extent to which it has become a political stage. This year, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has left a particularly visible imprint on the festivities, using an event that reaches deep into the city’s...

The BJP’s Ganesha Gambit

Pune’s Ganeshotsav has become an enormous civic and political stage, and the ruling party has proved adept at occupying it. Pune: The city’s Ganeshotsav is entering its final phase, but the festival has already demonstrated something beyond its extraordinary crowds and familiar spectacle: the extent to which it has become a political stage. This year, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has left a particularly visible imprint on the festivities, using an event that reaches deep into the city’s neighbourhoods as an opportunity for public outreach. The political appropriation of the festival has not, however, been without a counter-current. Demands were raised for curbs on noise pollution, loudspeakers and the volume of dhol-tasha performances. The argument was not against Ganeshotsav itself, but for moderation - notably, a complete ban on DJ music and limits on the number of dhol and tasha instruments used by performing troupes. Familiar Troubles The festival’s reality has been rather different. Major roads have been occupied by mandaps. Processions celebrating the arrival of Lord Ganesha have unfolded amid punishing noise. DJ music, while subject to restrictions, has continued. Traffic congestion has become a familiar feature of the festival, with the movement of political leaders adding another layer to the city’s already strained roads. The Peth areas have remained crowded deep into the night. The Shrimant Dagdusheth Halwai Ganpati temple has drawn enormous crowds for darshan from the opening day. From the old city to housing societies and neighbourhood mandals, Ganeshotsav touches virtually every part of Pune. For a political party seeking a direct connection with citizens, few occasions offer such a ready-made network of people, institutions and local influencers. The BJP enters this festival with an unusually formidable organisational base. It has two MPs, seven MLAs and more than 100 corporators in Pune. Murlidhar Mohol, one of the city’s MPs, is a Union Minister of State. Chandrakant Patil is a Cabinet minister in the Maharashtra government, while Madhuri Misal is a Minister of State. The party’s presence also extends into the festival’s organisational architecture. Its influence is visible across numerous mandals, large and small. BJP MLA Hemant Rasane is General Secretary of the Shrimant Dagdusheth Halwai Sarvajanik Ganpati Trust. Kunal Tilak, a member of Lokmanya Tilak’s family, is a BJP corporator. The political and cultural histories of Pune therefore intersect in ways that are difficult to ignore. The BJP’s senior leadership has also made the most of the occasion. National President Nitin Nabin visited Pune to seek Lord Ganesha’s blessings, while Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis visited the city before and during the festival. Such visits are about more than religious observance. In a festival watched by millions and embedded in the city’s social life, political visibility comes almost automatically. There is also talk in Pune that the BJP provided substantial financial support to Dhol-Lezim troupes and their organisers, with claims that some major mandals received financial backing as well. These claims would require independent verification, but the perception itself points to the depth of the political contest around Ganeshotsav. BJP workers, according to local observers, have also sought to make their presence more conspicuous than that of festivities organised by housing societies. Useful Expedient The festival arrives at a politically useful moment for the BJP. The party has faced disquiet on several fronts. Young people have been agitated over the paper-leak controversy. Broader public dissatisfaction has been voiced over inflation and unemployment, while government policies relating to ethanol and charges associated with UPI transactions have also generated criticism. While a political party can defend a policy in a press conference and advertise its achievements, during Ganeshotsav, its workers can be physically present in neighbourhoods, among processions, mandals, cultural groups and devotees. Politics thus becomes less about argument and more about visibility. That is the BJP’s advantage in Pune. Ganeshotsav, after all, is not simply a sequence of religious rituals. It is an elaborate civic network involving local organisers, volunteers, cultural groups, businesses, residents and political representatives. Whoever has influence over that network acquires a powerful channel of communication with the city. The BJP appears to understand this particularly well. Its strength in Pune’s electoral politics has been reinforced by a presence that extends beyond elections and into the institutions and social spaces that organise public life. The irony is that the very scale of the festival that makes it politically attractive also magnifies the civic costs. The political value of Ganeshotsav and the civic burden it creates are therefore two sides of the same phenomenon. For Pune, the larger question is not whether politics has entered Ganeshotsav. It has done so for decades. The more consequential question is whether the festival’s extraordinary social capital will remain primarily a vehicle for political outreach or whether the same influence can be used to reconcile celebration with the ordinary civic needs of the city. For the moment, the BJP seems to have understood the first proposition better than most.

Quiet Quitting, Slow Living: The New Lifestyle Choices

Writer: Aditi Pai
Aditi Pai
May 9, 2025
3 min read

In a world obsessed with speed, Gen Z is choosing to live life at half the pace—and twice the depth.

The hashtag #slowliving has crossed the six million mark on Instagram. Tiktok stars are spouting terms like ‘quiet quitting’ and ‘lazy girl jobs’ and Gen Z is ready to take a pause, breathe and reflect. Albeit while posting these lifestyle changes and choices on social media.


In an age of everything instant and fast, a quiet revolution is taking place in the minds and the lives of a few—embracing slow living. Just as what our grandparents did. Cooking is slow and meaningful, selecting seasonal vegetables from local farmers, making gravies from scratch and bringing out the brass pots and pans instead of the microwaves and air-fryers. Fashion chooses sustainability, longevity and durability over synthetic, wear-and-throw fast fashion. Screen time and-coffee-on-the-go mornings are making way for slow starts with painstakingly brewed tea and yoga-in-the-sunshine. Hobbies are going off-line—analogue photography is testing creativity and skill in a way no digital image can, and book reading clubs meet on Sunday mornings at neighbourhood parks in a bid to replace the screen with a paper book and make new connections.


Don’t expect to see the middle-aged making the shift. It’s the Gen Z that’s teaching an older generation how to take it slow and live ‘mindfully’. Quiet quitting means that Gen Z is choosing to not ‘overwork’, rather, using the free time to pursue hobbies or long coffee breaks. Rushing up the professional ladder isn’t a priority. While these trends may seem flippant and a middle-class population in India may not have the luxury of shunning that extra one hour of work, the movement shows that younger people aren’t willing to burn out early like a generation before them.


At its core, slow living is all about mindfulness and well thought of choices rather than the proverbial going with the flow. It’s the way we lead our lives until the onslaught of gadgets and the highly hyped charm of multi-tasking. It’s about stopping to smell the flowers and diving into conversations with your children rather than scrolling on the phone. It’s about soaking in the simpler things in life.


Movies made fast living fashionable. Slick English movies showed people sprinting to work with coffee and a croissant in hand. Slow living was demonised as a waste of time. Why cook when you can order in? Why repeat the same clothes when you can don new styles every week? Clicking multiple photographs on the phone and then colour correcting them is faster than waiting for the light to fall at the right place and carefully planning the frame before using even one of the limited 36 shots in a reel. Books have developed a voice as people listen to audio books and podcasts instead of sitting down to read.


But as stress-triggered mental ailments grow, there’s an awareness that fast living isn’t healthy. The human mind, isn’t really supposed to ‘multi-task’, a Mumbai-based psychologist told me once. When we shift rapidly from one thought or task to another, multiple times in a day, the mind gets confused and loses its ability to focus. Completing one job at a time is a better way to be more productive. Over-scheduling our calendars leaves little room for rest, or reflection. Slow living clears up space for the mind to rest and recoup.


Many would argue that slow living isn’t a practical solution for busy, nuclear families. There’s no one to share the duties as work hours get longer, deadlines get tighter and a deluge of entertainment options make us want to pack everything into our day. It’s probably a lifestyle for the privileged few who don’t have to struggle with home, work and social life duties. But it isn’t true.


Living in the moment helps us live more meaningfully. And we don’t need life coaches for that. Mimicking the routines of our grandparents is a ready lesson in slow living. When you cook or eat, don’t discuss work or scroll on the screen. Focus on the colours and flavours in your plate. On a walk, don’t listen to music or a podcast. Instead, watch things around you—the pathways, the street dogs or even a random bloom hiding beneath a leaf. Nature heals and nurtures. Take off those smart sneakers and feel the mud under your feet. Gaze at the moon or the stars at night instead of logging into a streaming platform before bedtime.


Slow living heals and nourishes the mind. It’s a break from the furious pace of wanting to over-achieve. It’s about dropping out of a race with the world, not wanting to catch up all the time. In reel and video terms, it’s all about living at x 0.5 times speed.

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