I’ve had some good listener feedback recently. And accordingly, I’ve changed the format of the show a little bit to suit your preferences. The characters of the week are now a separate mini-episode by themselves.
In this very first character of the week mini-episode, we’ll meet a God who naturally comes first. He’s worshipped before other gods.
This God is Ganesh or Ganapati
He has many other names too, including Vinayak and Gajanan.
Ganesh was created by his mom, Parvati, a Goddess herself. She made him out of clay, breathed life into him, and immediately put him on guard duty.
There was an unfortunate misunderstanding when his Dad Shiva the destroyer came home. Mistaking each other for strangers, they got into a fight. Shiva beheaded Ganesh. When Parvati found out, Shiva in an effort to stop her from destroying the universe, restored the boy to life, but the head was beyond recovery so he made do with an elephant’s head.
In most depictions you’ll see Ganesh with the elephant head, 4 hands, and a fairly large belly because of his love for Modaks. You’ll notice that one of his tusks is broken. There are two theories behind this. In one, Ganesh was returning home from a grand feast one night, his belly full of modaks. His ride, a mouse, spotted a snake, panicked, and tripped in the dark. Ganesh fell and his belly burst open all the food spilling out. Ganesh stitched his belly up. Using the snake!
All the time, the moon was watching this and found it to be very comical. He laughed out loud. Ganesh got angry and broke off his own tusk and flung it at the moon.
The other version we’ll save for later when we get to the Mahabharat.
This is what Ganesh looks like
An 8th century Ganesh sculpture
A 13th century sculpture
Ganesh festival in Paris, France
Ganesh scribing the Mahabharat
If you’d like to hear the Ganesha birth and head transplant incident in its entirety, check out the Thanksgiving special “Episode 6.5 – All in the Family”
That’s all for this mini-episode.
Next episode
This weekend’s full episode we’ll do a folk tale from Assam. We’ll see how cats could give birth to human children, and yet how it is impossible for humans to give birth to kitchen utensils.