May Lord Ganesha bless your journey

For our Indian friends the journey is going to begin. The suitcases are packed, all the relatives got their hugs and the best wishes of all family members accompany our students and their teacher.

This weekend 17 students and 2 teachers of Lotus Valley International School are bording on a direct Lufthansa flight from Delhi to Munich and will start a great adventure. They are traveling to Germany to take part in the German-Indian exchange project “Different countries – different sports“.  So I ask Lord Ganesha to bless this journey.

But why Ganesha? Only few Germans know about Hinduism and even fewer can distinguish the different gods and deities that occure in that religion.

Ganesha - Der Beseitiger der Hindernisse
Ganesha – गणेश – Vinayaka – Vigneshvara – only view of his many names.

However Ganesha is easy to identify being always represented with an elephant head and often in company with a mouse or rat. The serpent is a common attribut of Ganesha, too. The snake is wrapped around his neck or his big stomach. The stories about the “birth” of Ganesha is well known and there are lot of other myths about his life.

Among others Ganesha is considered to be the Lord of letters and learning and you can pray to the deva to get knowledge and wisdom.

But Lord Ganesha is also the Lord of obstacles. He places them and removes them from the path.

And to tell the truth – obstacles are the last thing our small group of students need on their trip to Germany. So let’s pray to Ganesh, that the journey shall happen without obstacles.

And if there is some extra knowledge for our students included, nobody won’t complain 😉