Widely believed to be among the most visited shrines in India, the Sri Venkateswara temple at Tirupati receives some 50,000 devotees on an average day. 1,200 km away, in winding queues that stretch as far as 6 km, an idol Ganesha, was thronged by about three lakh devotees every day for 11 days ending Sunday. Over three times the number of spectators in Beijing’s Bird’s Nest at full capacity, that was the daily gathering at Lalbaugcha Raja, an audience with whom mandates a wait that can last up to eight to 12 hours

Mumbai’s annual Ganesha festival has asserted once again that there can be no numerical outdoing of the frantic financial capital: There were 8,805 sarvajanik Ganesha mandals (that organise the Ganpati pandals for public viewing) in 2005. That number is now 11,000 says N Dahibaonkar, chairperson of the coordination committee of all these mandals. According to him, there were 15 lakh people at Girgaum Chowpatty on Sunday evening, a little over the population of Goa.

Each year, the numbers swell: Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) statistics say a total of 1,61,995 idols were immersed in 2007. This year’s number: 1,76,035.

The embellishments, too are even more vivid: Lalbaugcha Raja tied up with a portal for daily SMS updates; just the diamond-studded tilak on the forehead of the Goud Saraswat Brahmin Mandal’s Ganesha idol was worth Rs 14 lakh; all big mandals had queue systems within halls or adjacent grounds; a slew of mandals demanded Z-plus security from the Mumbai Police (but didn’t get it from a force already spread too thin).

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