Smartness: How Rintu Is Sweetly Preserving Traditions And Environment And Helping Those In Need

Is it unavoidable that we detach from our culture and traditions to embrace progressive ideas? Are our traditions only harmful to the environment and don’t make any sense? Should we go to extremes and fight with our traditions to form a progressive society? – ‘No’, We don’t need to. We can bring about a progressive change by balancing between our traditions and social needs, and people like Rintu Rathod are live examples to prove it.

The Background

Rintu is a commercial designer by profession and lives in Mumbai. She is making life-sized sculptures from chocolates. When asked about the best way to describe her work, she proudly says, ” I can make a chocolate replica of yours.”

” I can make a chocolate replica of yours.” – Rintu said to Team KenFolios on being asked about her work.

Readiness To Help Others

Rintu was successfully doing her business of making sculptures from chocolates when she perceived her readiness to work for others. It was the year 2014 when a devastating earthquake hit the northernmost part of India in Jammu And Kashmir. Indian armed forces and disaster management teams were relentlessly carrying out rescue operations in quake-affected areas. Rintu felt that the food supplies by armed-forces are mostly dry-food material, and the people already suffering from the worst are craving for wet home-cooked food. She decided to prepare ‘Thepalas – a spicy roti from Gujarati cuisine’ and invited other friends to join the movement. Her WhatsApp message went viral, and the team prepared 35000 ‘Thepalas’ which were later sent to Kashmir. This incidence formed them in a group named ‘Food-Army’ which also helped the sufferers of almost all natural-calamities including Nepal Earthquake and Kerala Flood.

The Idea Of Chocolate Ganesha

On a routine Mumbai day, Rintu was doing her morning walk at the Juhu Beach of Mumbai when she came across several broken parts of Ganesha Idols. The yearly ‘Ganesha Festival’ had just passed, and people from nearby areas immersed the idols in Juhu sea as per the rituals. The idols that are usually made of POP(Plaster Of Paris) were lying broken, and people even stepped over them. This left Rintu heartbroken as Bhagwan Ganesha is her favorite deity. The thought of doing something to address the problem kept lingering in her mind – it was while doing the morning walk that Rintu decided to create Chocolate Ganesha Idols.

Rintu decided to make it a social movement and not a profession. The idea of making chocolate Ganeshas and immersing them in milk as per the rituals was a great idea – she got massive appreciation. The thought was pro-environment and produced chocolate milk as prasad to distribute in devotees and needy people.

Despite her thought being completely non-commercial, she attracted some criticism. But the appreciation was much more than the critique and kept her going. She has been promoting chocolate Ganesh as an alternate and environment-friendly change. 

In a world where we often fall short of ideas to adopt progressive ideas without ruining our traditions, people like Rintu teach society to embrace the future without losing the bond with our past.

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