From archeological evidence it appears that Lord Ganesha or the Elephant God has been worshipped from beginning of the fourth and fifth centuries during the Gupta Period. Worship of Lord Ganesha ia very widespread and not restricted to Hindus only. Many Jains and Buddhists worship Lord Ganesha too. Even Vaishnavaites, the followers of Vishnu worship Lord Ganesha.

Ganesha is the son of Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvati. There are numerous interesting stories about him. He is honoured with affection at the start of any ritual, ceremony or any new venture and invoked as the "Patron of Letters" at the beginning of any writing of important documents. This is considered very auspicious.

One popular way to worship Ganesha is to chant one of the Ganesha Sahasranaamas, which literally means "a thousand names of Ganesha". Each name in the sahasranama conveys a different meaning and symbolises a different aspect of Ganesha. The shorter version is the ashtothara.

Ganesha has been represented with an elephant head since thousand of years. Puranic stories explain how he got his elephant head as it is said that he was born with a human head and only later acquired the elephant head.

One of the earliest name of Lord Ganesha is Ekadanta which literally means “one tusk”, (the other was broken off). Some of the earliest images of Ganesha show him holding his broken tusk.^[The importance of this distinctive feature is reflected in the Mudgala Purana, which states that the name of Ganesha's second incarnation is Ekadanta.

The other distinctive feature is Ganesha's protruding belly . This feature is so important that according to the Mudgala Purana two different incarnations of Ganesha use names based on it, Lambodara ("Pot Belly", or literally "Hanging Belly") and Mahodara ("Great Belly"). Both names are Sanskrit compounds describing his belly (Sanskrit: udara). The Brahmanda Purana says that he has the name Lambodara because all the universes (i.e., cosmic eggs; Sanskrit brahmāṇḍas) of the past, present, and future are present in Ganesha.

The number of Ganesha's arms varies; his best-known forms have between two and sixteen arms. He is depicted as having a divine serpent, Vasuki around his stomach. His mount is usually a mouse , but in his incarnation as Vakratunda he uses a lion, a peacock in his incarnation of Vikata, and Shesha, the divine serpent, in his incarnation as Vighnaraja, a horse as Dhumraketu and a rat as Gajanana. Jain depictions of Ganesha show his vahana variously as a mouse, an elephant, a tortoise, a ram, or a peacock.

Read on our bulletin board, what some of our customers have to say about Ganesha Prarthana.