Managing the Puja on Navratri
By Manu Shrivastava
Navratri is celebrated across most homes in Mumbai. And, in a city as crammed as Mumbai, where space is a luxury not everyone enjoys, one has to make a few adjustments. During Navratri, most Hindus hold puja throughout the ten days in their homes. But, for those who don’t have a puja room in their homes, things get a little tricky.
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| Newly-married Sapna and Dinesh Patil praying to the Devi at a temple in South Mumbai |
Thane-based newly-wed Sapna and Dinesh Patil have been working on creating a specially-illustrated puja zone in their home. “Being artists ourselves, we will be having our own unique paintings and installations in a section of our home to earmark a puja zone,” says Sapna whose home is crunched for space. The couple have turned the inadequacy of space into an opportunity to display their talents.
Like her, there are many who face huge space crunch issues and are unable to enjoy the festivities associated with Navratri just because “having to clear up the entire room after the festival is over can be a trying task.” However, it doesn’t have to be like this. One can easily make a small, temporary puja space in one’s home with least amount of expenditure. The puja space doesn’t have to be just a few religious goods put together. It can look like the real thing too.
Nevertheless, it’s better if you plan something like this well in advance, rather than just going with the flow. Because, if you don’t have a puja room in your home and set out to make arrangements for a puja at the 11th hour, chances are you won’t get things that are ‘suitable’ for your home and may be left with little option but to make do with whatever is available.
So, for starters, handpick a place to ‘make a puja room’ in your home. Ensure the space is not something you use frequently. It is always better to pick a diagonal corner (where two walls meet) in one room rather than picking out a whole wall. If it’s in a corner it will take up lesser space. If you choose an entire wall to set up a mandir, you’ll end up taking up half the room to display things needed for puja.
Now, after you have picked a corner, make a list of all the important things that you need for the 10 days of the puja. You can divide the list into two – things that you will need daily and things you will need on some particular days. Get the idol or the photograph you are using to worship on these days and make sure that it isn’t too big for the space you have selected for the puja room. It is better if you put a small table in that corner and put the idol or photo on it.
This way, you can place other puja items below the table. Make arrangements that the things you need on a daily basis are placed below the table. Items like haldi, kumkum, rice, roli and other such things should be kept in one compartmentalised box so that they don’t clutter the space.
Now, for the puja material, get non-perishable items that you will need for each particular day of the puja before the Navratri begins and place them in a cabinet. Arrange them on the basis of the day you need them so that you don’t have to search for those ‘particular’ things that you will need on that ‘particular’ day of the puja. For decorations, take out your previous year’s festive lights and place them around the table. You can put plastic flowers to decorate the space. This way, you will need flowers on a daily basis only for offering and not for the decoration.
Get those plastic cloth-hanging hooks and stick it on the diagonal walls to hang a chunari that will work as the curtain for the puja room. Make sure that the chunari is hung a little away from the table so that there aren’t any fire hazards. If you have bare minimum things in the make-shift puja room of yours and have made arrangements to keep other puja-related things in some cabinet, there is a very little chance that the area will get messy.
It takes a bit but will ensure you breeze through the ten days of puja during Navratri.
Click here to download PDF of the Navratri 2022 Special 'Devi Dhamaka'
