Office crowd braves rain, takes pandal route on way home
Times of India | 4 October 2024
Kolkata: With some of the big-budget pujas already inaugurated and the rest getting final touches, professionals have started taking a sneak peek into the pandals on the way home from their workplaces. On Thursday evening, many even ignored the drizzle to get a glimpse of the pandals.
Sreebhumi Sporting Club in Lake Town, where chief minister Mamata Banerjee had flagged off the festivities on Monday, was packed with revellers on Thursday evening.
Interestingly, many were found in office attire and admitted that they were there to watch the extravaganza much before the actual puja began just to avoid more queues.
“After my office shift ended, I picked up a friend and visited the Sreebhumi Sporting Club puja. It remains on my list every year,” said Rahul Majumdar, a resident of Dunlop, who works at a private bank in Salt Lake.
Even the evening rain couldn’t dampen the spirit of the revellers who hit the road in significant numbers even with just a handful of puja pandals opening their gates for public viewing. “On actual puja days, it gets extremely taxing to visit these big-ticket pujas where one needs to wait in the queue for hours. Hence, we have started early this time,” said Arpita Som, a homemaker from Belgharia who was at the New Town Sarbojonin Durga puja pandal that was inaugurated on Wednesday. Samaresh Das, an organiser of the puja committee, said they had not anticipated such a rush on a weekday and had to deploy extra volunteers and guards to ensure smooth crowd management.
Organisers of Ekdalia Evergreen, which is set to be inaugurated on Saturday, had to allow visitors to have a look at the pandal after many people started crowding under the Gariahat flyover demanding entry. “Around 4.30 pm, when the rain held up, a group of 100-odd students from an aviation and hospitality institute gathered in front of the Ekdalia Evergreen pandal and kept requesting entry. We removed the first set of barriers and escorted them to the entry point but couldn’t let them inside the main pandal,” said a Kolkata Police ACP in charge of Gariahat. He said extra deployment had to be made in front of popular pandals at Gariahat, Hatibagan and Behala even though they hadn’t opened.
The officer added traffic was slow on these stretches from late afternoon till late night due to the triple whammy of office-returning revellers, shoppers and the rain.
Sandipan Bandyopadhyay of Natun Dal Durga puja committee in Behala said they had to deploy multiple private security guards to prevent the revellers from entering the unfinished pandal immediately after the chief minister left the pandal after inaugurating it on Thursday evening. The pandal will open its gates to the public on Oct 5.