Across India, almost no beginning is undertaken without first invoking Gaṇeśa. A wedding, the foundation of a house, the opening of a ledger, the first page of a book, the start of a journey — each begins with his name. He is Vighnaharta or Vighneśvara, "lord and remover of obstacles," and the logic of placing him first is woven deep into ritual life.

The right to this precedence — the agra-pūjā, "first worship" — is granted in the origin myths themselves. When Śiva restored the boy with the elephant's head and made him chief of his hosts (gaṇa-īśa, hence Gaṇeśa), he bestowed the boon that Ganesha be honoured before all other deities at the outset of any rite. To skip him is to invite the very obstacles he governs; to honour him is to ask that the path ahead be cleared.

There is a subtlety worth lingering on. Ganesha is called both the remover and, in his older epithets, the placer of obstacles — Vighnakartā as well as Vighnaharta. This is not a contradiction. An obstacle can be a protection as much as a hindrance; the same lord who clears the worthy path can set a check before the unready or the unrighteous. He guards thresholds, and a threshold both opens and closes. This is why he sits so often at doorways and at the edges of temple complexes — a presence one must acknowledge before passing through.

The great public expression of his worship is Gaṇeśa Caturthī (also Vināyaka Caturthī), celebrated on the fourth day of the bright fortnight of the lunar month of Bhādrapada, usually in August or September. Devotees install clay images of Ganesha in homes and grand public pavilions, offering flowers, durva grass, and especially modak, the sweet dumpling he is said to love. After days of devotion — one, three, five, seven, or ten, by custom — the images are carried in joyous procession to a river, tank, or the sea and immersed (visarjana), where the clay dissolves back into the water from which it was shaped. The immersion enacts a quiet teaching: form arises from the formless and returns to it, and the divine, having visited, departs carrying the devotees' difficulties away.

It is worth noting that the festival's scale is in part historical. While the worship is ancient, its modern public grandeur, especially in Maharashtra, owes much to the late nineteenth century, when the leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak encouraged large communal celebrations as a means of bringing people together under colonial rule. Regional practice still varies widely — in eddies of custom over the number of days, the materials of the image, and the songs sung — but the heart is everywhere the same: begin with Ganesha, and the way will open.