No wonder, then, that festivals have become the new hunting grounds for predatory politicians, with parties spending an estimated Rs 100 crore this year to sponsor Mumbai’s 8,500 Ganesh pandals. The 10 pm curfew was also obligingly extended to midnight, but predictably no one offered to pick up the tab for polluting the sea with 1.07 lakh idols, pay overtime to 11,000 constables, or compensate for the man hours lost to bottlenecks.

We are, after all, a secular country. Except that this constitutional right to worship is insidiously encroaching on personal and civic rights. Like, what about our basic right to skip the party, thank you very much? Or our right to peace and quiet in our own homes? To freedom of movement? Or plain old-fashioned respect for personal privacy? We need to defend these by law. Instead of submitting meekly to the sound and fury, we need to ensure that festivals can still signify the sublime.