My happiest day as an amateur photographer

In the future everyone will have their fifteen minutes of fame - Andy Warhol

Today was Ganesh Chaturthi. I am a firm non-believer in organized religion... however there was always something not quite right about Ganpati. As a kid, I was regularly taken to temples and if you have ever been to one, you will know that every temple has a Ganesh statue. Rather than remembering each god by his name and the technique to pray to each, I would simply hold hands in front of the Ganesh statue and petition for a cycle/good marks/my crush of the time.

I also liked the Ganpati temple at Titvala, not just because going there involved a full day trip but as it was really peaceful once you are in. It's very Maharashtrian, very old school, which works for me.
In junior college and a significant part of my engineering life, I was a regular at the local temple, thanks to my influences at that time. It was a Shiva temple but I would pray at the Ganpati idol outside the main sanctum and consider my visit done.

Also, some of most cherished memories are of the time I (with a group of my close friends) organized the Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations in my society. The buzz surrounding the festivities was infectious and I was involved in every activity, of course except the dancing competition.

Anyway, today was Ganesh Chaturthi. We have a set routine that's followed every year on this day. Dad plays tapes of Ganpati aartis in the morning, we hear the society Ganpati being brought in to the sounds of Nashik dhols, and this is followed by a traditional lunch on a banana leaf. Things were going fine till dinner after which I came online to check my emails. I glanced through the emails on Yahoo and then logged into Gmail -- It said 54 unread emails! Something was not quite right. I first thought that I was the victim of some spam attack but that was before I checked the subject line of these emails. All the emails were notifications from Picasa -- in the last 20 hours I had recieved close to 60 comments and another 40 had favourited me (still counting).

I checked the oldest of these mails and they were comments on the crab picture I had taken at Kalavantin. And below the first comment I saw another 20 comments. Didn't take long for me to realize that this picture was a featured photo on Picasa. Second on the list, not sure if that's of any significance. What I do know is that anyone in the world logging into Picasa would see an impression of my photo if he cared to scroll down. There were comments from all over the world, and thanks to Picasa's built in translator feature I could make out the good things being said.

It was unbelievable that this was happening to me. Every time I logged in to Picasa, I would look at featured list and seriously doubt if I would ever make it to these hallowed halls of fame. It was a day I only dreamed of... because there was no information online about how a picture makes it on the list, which could be engineered to make my way into the list. I still don't understand how photos are selected for the featured page. This pic is not the best I have clicked, in fact I wouldn't rate it above average. While I am still elated, I have a feeling similar to what A.R. Rehman must have had on winning the Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire.

On that note, here's my winning speech. I would like to thank the crab who tried swimming in flowing water, my friend Mahesh who pointed him out to me, and lastly... the great Ganesha who continues to work in mysterious ways.
As I said there was always something not quite right about Ganpati ;)