Ganapati Bappa Morya… in Korea..

All our efforts and planning for weeks finally came to fruition yesterday when we celebrated Ganesh Chaturthi in Seoul National Universities auditorium. And we celebrated it with such great aplomb this time that everybody took  great festive feelings back home.

This was our 4th year of Ganesh Chaturthi celebration in Korea. Satish ji initiated this at his residence few yrs ago by inviting few friends over and now the celebrations have moved to an auditorium which accommodates more than 300 people.

This year the festival was celebrated by Vedic Culture Centre in collaboration with Seoul National University students (ISA@SNU). The students at Seoul National University were the backbone for this festival who did everything from hall booking, stage and sitting arrangements, music arrangements, receiving the guests to even cleaning proactively.

Since we were not able to get any hall on 11th September, we took liberty and celebrated the festival on 19th September 2010 as per convenience. And taking into consideration the very unusual location of SNU campus we managed to gather more than 300 guests for the celebrations.

Ganpati Bappa Morya

The day started with Ganesh Pooja by Pandit Chaturvedi ji, the only pandit in Korea. This was followed by a speech by the Ambassador of Nepal. Later we had performances by Prashant ji, SNU students, Kamala Mataji along with members of Vedic culture center, kids and a super finale by Pushpanjali Mataji from Russia performing Bharatnatyam.

Prasadam was served at around 1 pm. After all the shows were over we performed the Sukhaharta-Dukhaharta aarti and then proceeded towards the river for Visarjan shouting Ganpati Bappa Morya on the streets of Korea. The energy and excitement of that day is beyond words to describe and something to be felt on a personal level. Below are the pictures of our festival.