COIMBATORE: Dressed in a traditional attire, three-year-old Dhivyashini waited patiently in the queue along with her parents at the Sree Ayyapan temple in Siddhapudur on the occasion of Vijayadhasami on Monday.
When her turn came, Dhivyashini sat on her mother’s lap near a priest and extended her right hand. The priest held her forefinger and made her write ‘Om Hari Sri Ganapataye Namah’ on a rice plate. He then poured the rice into a paper cover, handed it over to her and blessed her.
“It is believed that the ritual would make children studious. We have been following it for generations and didn’t want to break it. If my daughter doesn’t do it now, she might not be able to do it at all. She is already three years old and we can’t delay her formal education any longer. That’s why we risked doing it even during the pandemic situation,” said Dhivyashini’s mother Kavitha.
Hundreds of parents had brought their children to the temple for the ritual. A member of the temple committee said that 1,500 children underwent the ritual. “As many as 4,500 devotees, mostly from the district, visited the temple. But the footfall is significantly less compared to the previous years. We used to get people from neighbouring districts including Tirupur and Erode,” he said. “Devotees were screened for fever before entry and were given hand sanitizers. All of them wore face masks.”
“Priests from Kerala used to arrive on the Vijayadhasami day. But this year, many of them could not come due to the pandemic. We had only six priests to initiate children to the world of letters compared to 15 last year. To check crowding, we distributed tokens to parents three days ago,” he said. “Traditionally, Om Hari Sri Ganapataye Namah is written on the tongue of the child using a gold needle dipped in honey. But we could not do it because of the pandemic. We also had to cancel annadhanam (community feast).”
Some parents chose to do the ritual at home. “We wanted to do it in a temple but later decided to do it at our house because we didn’t want to risk it,” said Kavya, a mother.