This is one of those entries that I don’t actually know the story behind, but it at least suggests that there is one…
On the same outing from the previous post, the Insurmountable Mr Bugg and I opted to climb down a less-than-wheelchair-friendly route to the water’s edge where I knew we’d have a better view of the sunrise – that is, of course, if the sunrise wasn’t shrouded in clouds, which it was. The region is a nice enough beach, but requires a little bit of an awkward descent down to the water level from the road some seven or eight meters above, along a heavily eroded near-cliff face held in place by tree roots – not your ideal picnic area, in other words. Yet, as we got down there, we found this idol of the hindu god ganesha sitting on a small rise facing the water, a little ways down the beach.
First off, the condition of the statue says that it’s seen better days, and may have been sitting there for quite a while, or may have washed up and been placed there by the finder. It’s hard to imagine that it was put there intentionally as some sort of observance, but who knows? On another outing many kilometers away on the same lake, we’d found what appeared to be a food offering on the beach, too early in the morning for anyone’s lunch and arranged too neatly to be a randomly-forgotten snack. Is this common? I have no idea.
ganesha is a god of good fortune in the hindu pantheon, and perhaps best known as the remover of obstacles, but also as the patron of arts, sciences, intellect, and wisdom, so there is a bit of irony in this post pleading near total ignorance. And given that this area of the lake showed little debris at all, and what could be found was mostly in the form of fishing line and the occasional soda bottle, it’s a pretty random object to appear there. I’ll leave it up to you to piece together the full story.