“Golu mela”, 2004

Starting last year, my wife and my daughter started to celebrate “Golu”, a festival where they arrange various dolls for display and invite family and friends, present them with traditional “vethalai & paku” and small token item as gift.

If you ask me, this is one of the best festival in the Hindu religion, basically being in a far away land from home, we hardly get to meet people from our community, this festival paves the way, my wife had invited about 40+ at least, many were Moms of my daughter’s school buddies, many from our neighborhood . This also included Americans.
It was 9 days [actually evenings] of people, people and people, when I went home, there would be someone visiting.

Last year during this time, my dad was here in DC, he went around finding old cartoons and giant size suitcases, my red color computer books and built the steps. I never went near to help them also. It was nice and compact for our town home.

However this year, a new house, so my wife intended to build real steps, the commercial ones sold in New Jersey area ranged from $300-$400. Simply it was too costly. So I decided to build it on my own, when in comes to wood work, Homer Simpson works better than me. In a scale of 1 to 10, I rank -20 in wood work.


I had no clue, to my shock and surprise, wood work is not that hard, with my brother-in- law’s help we built this “golu” steps for something less than $100.
Home depot sells some thing called raises, which are sides for the steps Each costs about $15, get 2 of them, and create a triangle to hold them , get 2 long wood planks [16 feet each] $15 each, cut them into 4 feet , hey! It was ready in 2 hrs. The raises were in even number so we added a ground level step, which does not feature in the photo.


Ps: We had got a doll cricket set from Chennai, the wicketkeeper was Patel, and I dropped him. He does not deserve a place even in “golu”,