SHUBHANGI SHIFA
Ranchi, Sept 30: The city devotees are set to visit the various Durga Puja pandals made after a gap of two years to celebrate Navratri. Pandal makers, on the other hand, are working night and day to get the pandals ready for the visits, with a plan to astonish the devotees through the various designs and concepts.
As per the pandal makers that visit Ranchi from West Bengal, mainly Kolkata, they plan several elaborate designs for up to at least a year before they are ready to put up the designs conceptualised.
While explaining his process of designing the pandal, Panchmukhi Harmu Mandir designer Debashish Cuchhait said, “I have been designing pandals based on what I see around me for the past 20 years. I travel and talk to others, trying to stay informed of the changes in our surroundings and problems faced by the people. That is how inspiration strikes and I start designs.”
“The reason behind me looking for inspiration in such a manner is because I want to bring about a change, however small. When roaming about the city sometimes, several ideas strike at once. I create some pandals from them, while some remain unused, as either the organisers want different designs,” Cuchhait added.
Upon his idea regarding the pandal in Harmu, he said, “I’ve noticed after the pandemic, that there is a huge difference between how we spent our childhood and children these days. We would wait for the moment our mothers would allow us to go out, and now, mothers keep requesting the children to go out and play instead of spending all their time on electronic devices.”
“We would go out to play badminton, kho kho, cricket and even gilli danda but children these days play PUBG, mini militia, Apex Legends, GTA and Assasin’s Creed, all of which require screen time. Through the pandal at Harmu, I’m trying to tell parents what is missing in the lives of their children, as mobile and computer games overpower kho kho and cricket,” said Cuchhait.
He further said that children sometimes say that even when they are frustrated, they cannot stop playing. “They stop talking to family members and get addicted. This is what I want to make parents and children aware of. Children now are even separated from the environment and don’t know names of trees and flowers, which should not have been the case,” he added.
When asked about other pandals he had designed this year, he said, “The concept of heaven is something that excites people. They believe that heaven is a place full of clouds, beautiful, clean and pure. What they don’t understand is heaven is right here on earth, and we can experience it without much work. All we need is to realise the importance of relationships in our lives.”
“For instance, the bond between mother and child, the relationship between a brother and sister who love each other despite arguments or the love for a friend are all little pieces of heaven on earth. My design tries to explain that once humans realise this, and acknowledge the presence of heaven on Earth, they will achieve all they desire, along with the much-needed peace,” said Cuchhait.
A pandal engineer Uttam Pal, who has designed pandals at RR Sporting Club, Bakri Bazaar, Chandra Shekhar Azad Club and many more this year said, “Ideas can strike anywhere. A mother carrying a child as she picks up garbage, a rickshaw driver trying to pull his rickshaw, the poor trying to manage after the pandemic, and many other scenarios can bring up ideas in artists if they are looking for it.”
“We design and plan for a whole year, draw while we travel on trains, and observe characters and then express their emotions and feelings through pandals. Meanwhile, many times, organisers want us to copy buildings, for instance, the Bakri Bazar pandal organisers asked my team to make the Mayapur ISKCON temple as a pandal, so we worked in that manner,” Pal said.
