Children paint a pandal wall in Barisha. Picture by Aranya Sen

Amid the action by master craftsmen from far corners of Bengal and beyond, there are a couple of pujas where little hands are doing up pandals their way. Here children have been given a free run with the paint brush and colour.

The organisers, members of CESC The Telegraph True Spirit Puja, may not vie for crowns for creative excellence but they have embraced the ideal of inclusiveness that sarbojanin puja is all about.

On Sunday morning, many a mother was waiting in front of the Barisha Shakti Sangha pandal near Behala, not for school to give over but for their children to agree to go home. “She woke up early and completed studies for her history test on Tuesday. I have never seen her so excited,” wondered Debjani Dutta, mother of Sohini, a Class VII student. “Who knew we’d ever get a chance to decorate our para puja?” gushed Sohini.

This excitement is what the organisers are hoping to sustain. “We need a new generation to get involved in puja,” said Tarun Mukherjee.

With that aim, two outer walls of the pandal had been left to students of local art schools Barisha Shilpara Art Society and Pancham Gandhar as well as mentally challenged kids from Divine Smile.

At the other end of town, in Maniktala, buses from a number of schools for challenged children have been standing parked for six months now. Autism Society of India, Manovikas Kendra, Prerna and Pradip are some of the schools that have been ferrying the artistes who are decorating the pandal of Purba Maniktala Sarbojanin by Swapnar Bagan Yubak Brinda. Chintu Gupta, Raju Prasad, Deepak Goenka and Bikash Shaw are creating paper lanterns and flowers for the pandal walls. But praise does not reach their ears as they can neither hear nor speak.

“We wanted to make them feel a part of puja,” said Sushanta Das, overseeing their work. The puja itself has chosen differently abled children as its theme, showcasing quotations in braille and tips on how to identify challenged children in infancy.