{"id":10799,"date":"2012-01-28T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-28T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2012\/01\/28\/saraswati-puja-in-bengal-is-no-study-day\/"},"modified":"2012-01-28T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-01-28T12:00:00","slug":"saraswati-puja-in-bengal-is-no-study-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2012\/01\/28\/saraswati-puja-in-bengal-is-no-study-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Saraswati Puja in Bengal is &#8220;No Study&#8221; Day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pardaphash.com\/news\/saraswati-puja-in-bengal-is-no-study-day\/687527.html>Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>KOLKATA, INDIA, January 28, 2012 (pardaphash.com): Saraswati Puja comes as a huge joy to children in Bengal as they don&#8217;t have to study. Yes, on the day when the Goddesses of Knowledge, Ma Saraswati, is worshipped people here in the state take part in colorful ceremonies and prepare mouth watering delicacies but do not pick up books. Saraswati puja is one of the biggest festivals in the Bengali calendar year after Diwali. Marquees have come all over this city and elsewhere in West Bengal on the occasion. The Goddess is also being worshipped in homes, schools and colleges. Wearing bright yellow clothes signifying the onset of spring, devotees &#8211; mainly students and teenagers- lined up to seek the blessings of the goddess. Unmarried girls and boys clad in saris and kurta thronged various puja pandals across the city. Although the puja is offered in the early morning, the celebrations continue through the day as students keep their books in front of the goddess for her blessings. The day is unofficially considered as &#8220;no study&#8221; day in Bengal with students not even touching their books.<\/p>\n<p>The occasion was also observed at the Assam Tribune campus with enthusiasm. Bansi Chandra Pal, popularly known as Gopal Da, an artisan in Bengali Tola area of the city, says: &#8220;The festivities around Durga Puja undoubtedly are more lucrative, but the preparation has to start six months prior and it takes a huge number of laborers and ample amount to time to prepare the grand statues of different gods and goddess who are worshipped in puja pandals. This costs us a lot of money on labour and expensive raw material whose price also goes up during that season. Also there are very few puja organizers.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10799\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}