The Ganesha I Had Never Seen Before!

 

I wasn't looking for him.  😊

I was just scrolling the way you do at a break, thumb moving faster than thought. And then he was there - A gigantic Ganesha wading through a river, a city skyline waiting on the far bank. I scrolled past the reel. Then I scrolled back.

That's usually how the important thoughts arrive not when you go looking for them, but when they refuse to let you keep scrolling.

Monday is Ganesha Chaturthi. I've seen this god a thousand times. But tonight I actually looked at him instead of just recognising him and once I did, I couldn't stop finding myself in the shape of him. I'm a psychotherapist, a counsellor in a common man language and a coach. I sit with people's unsaid things for a living. So maybe it's no surprise that when I finally looked closely, I didn't see a deity I saw a something more in him. 😊

Start with the ears - In temple sculpture they are often shaped like a soop - the flat winnowing fan every Indian household once used to separate grain from husk. It doesn't reject the harvest because it arrives mixed with chaff it takes in everything first, and only afterward lets the useless part fly off. Most of us listen with a sieve that's already decided what to keep. Ganesha listens with a fan that takes in the whole harvest before judging any of it.

Then the trunk - As a child in Dharmasthala and Sringeri, I had to wait to my turn for the temple elephant to lower its trunk onto my head that warm, oddly gentle weight of a blessing. What I never noticed back then, the same trunk that blessed me had just curled a banana into its mouth, and would soon spray water over its own back. One organ, three jobs - feeding, cleansing, blessing. Never confused. Biologists say an elephant's trunk can uproot a tree or lift a single grain of rice without crushing it. A counsellor needs exactly that range - strong enough to receive what's unbearably heavy, gentle enough not to break what's still fragile. And crucially, the same trunk that swallows also splashes and releases. If we only take in and never let anything pass back through us as awareness, we stop being witnesses and become storage units for other people's pain instead.

Then the boy at the door - Before he was the beloved son everyone worships, Ganesha briefly guarded Parvati's bath and was told to let no one pass. Shiva, who arrived was refused anyway. Not rebellion, but consistency. That's the earliest recorded case of professional boundaries. 😊
A counselling room has to hold the same shape of compassion and patience for everyone in the chair, powerful or wrecked, articulate or barely speaking. Rule is a rule, nothing can bend and that forms our ethics.

And the question that wouldn't leave me alone - Why did Ved Vyasa choose Ganesha, of everyone available, to write the Mahabharata? He heard every syllable of the Bhagavad Gita before anyone else on earth did and nowhere does Ganesha claim authorship, or hint that he "knows how it ends." He was the vessel the river passed through, not the source it claims to be.
But knowing someone's story does not give us the right to carry it into the world. It asks something else of us - Confidentiality. Discretion. Humility.

You may know much. You may understand much. But you do not need to announce that you know.

Perhaps that, too, is a form of wisdom. A counsellor often knows more of someone's story than their own family does, and the discipline is never letting that information become currency, not gossip, not chin-wag, not advice dropped where it wasn't asked for. You carry it the way a vessel carries water, without mistaking yourself for the river.

A quick honest pause - none of this is a settled theology. Regional traditions tell Ganesha's story differently, and the winnowing-fan reading is one of my lens among several.

Ganesha stopped being just a deity I was looking at.

He became a mirror in my thought. His ears reminded me to listen. His trunk reminded me to receive, hold and release. His story reminded me not to let identity, status or personal bias interfere with how I meet another human being and what do I share with them!

His traditional association with the Mahabharata reminded me that listening must be accompanied by understanding and that what we are entrusted with must be held with discretion.

And then I wondered: How many such lessons have we been looking at all our lives without really seeing  them?

Perhaps our epics are not always asking us to merely remember stories. Perhaps they are inviting us to interpret ourselves through them.

We often look at our traditions as something belonging to the past. But maybe the past is not always behind us.

Sometimes, it is sitting quietly in front of us - waiting for us to look at it differently.

A counsellor learns to look beneath behaviour. Perhaps we can do the same with our stories.

Look beneath the symbol. Beneath the ritual and the familiar image. Because sometimes, what we have seen a hundred times becomes meaningful only when we finally see it for the first time.

And perhaps that was my real realisation this evening.

I thought I was looking at Ganesha. But maybe Ganesha was helping me look at myself and at the way I hold things.

Maybe wisdom does not always arrive as a new idea.

Sometimes, it is an old idea… seen with new eyes.

Happy Ganesha Chaturthi.