Following the communal tension which gripped the city few days back, Durga Puja festivities can be an apt platform to make an appeal for peace and harmony. That’s what Morabadi’s Geetanjali Club Durga Puja Samiti has turned into a theme for puja pandal this year.
In Morabadi, Goddess Durga, the embodiment of shakti (power), will stay at a replica of Buddhist temple, a place centered around lord Buddha’s teachings of peace, during the ten days of Shardiya Navratri.
“In light of the recent outburst of religious hatred which the city saw, we thought our pandal should be a medium to propagate peace and harmony among the denizens of Ranchi,” said Manoj Kumar Gupta, member of the organising club.
Geetanjali Club Durga Puja Samiti is known for creating marvels with limited space and funds. The pandal, located barely a hundred meters from Divyayan Chowk in Tagore Hill Road, has been made in the likeness of an imaginary Buddhist shrine using a budget of `15 lakhs.
“The pandal itself costs `8 lakh. The idol of Goddess Durga is worth another `2 lakh. lighting and sound will go up to `1.5 lakh and Rupees one lakh respectively. Expenses incurred in puja and visarjan have been pegged at `51 thousand each,” stated Gupta.
He added, “The idol of the goddess will have a marble finish to it. We have sculptors from Kantai in West Bengal, led by Haripado, working on it. Workers, making the idol and pandal, invested 6 months in preparing and finalising their design and then have been working for one month here to create these designs in reality.” lighting arrangements for the pandal are to be handled by technicians from Chandannagar. Along with all the usual arrangements, the pandal of Geetanjali Club will reverberate with dhaki music.
“For the past ten years, a troupe of dhakis from Bankura, led by Sadhan Pal, have been coming to play at our pandal,” Gupta said. Also, the Club prides its pandal to be the most eco-friendly one in the city. We have been receiving this title for the past seven years.
Equal attention has been given to make it as safe a Puja as it will be elegant. “Usually, we ourselves arrange for fire extinguishes and sand bags in preparation to handle a fire. Also, in accordance to the recent directives from Ranchi police, we will be installing eight CCTV cameras with 4 of our volunteers to monitor the feeds,” Gupta said.