Shrimant Dagdusheth Halwai Ganpati

The Shrimant Dagdusheth Halwai Sarvajanik Ganpati Trust, based in Pune was established in he year 1893 and has thus been in the service of devotees since 108 years.
It was in 1893 when Lokmanya Balgangadhar Tilak gave a public form to the celebration of the festival of Ganpati and made it a genuinely people's festival. The Shrimant Dagdusheth Halwai Sarvajanik Ganpati trust exists from the year of the inception of the sarvajanik (public) Ganpati festival and is the fulcrum of all sarvajanik(public) celebrations in Maharashtra.
The festivities of Dagdusheth Halwai Ganpati festival attract people from all over India and now in this age of liberalization and globalization, from all round the world.
The goal of the trust is to make the celebration of Ganeshotsav based on the principles set out by Tilak and the path of devotion shown by saints Dnyaneshwar and Tukaram. To make it a celebration of morality and humanity and nationalism.
India is following the path of economic liberalization, which is bringing in many changes in Indian society, opening up many opportunities for those who are ready to learn and work hard. It is even more important in these times of change to sustain the humanity of human beings, the homeliness of our homes and the godliness of our gods.
In the last few decades, the celebration of this festival left a lot to be desired. The intelligentsia began pointing out to the malpractices that had entered the celebrations. The rituals and the sense of social participation was giving way to commercialization. It was felt that the direction of the festival needed to be changed. It was felt by many that it was only the shrimant Dagdusheth Halwai Sarvajanik Ganpati trust that could show the way.
The trust took up this responsibility and organized many seminars and camps and workshops to discuss and guide people about how the festival could be made more participatory and at the same time contribute to society. Various mandals from all round Maharashtra started coming to seek advice on topics like how to maintain a temple, how to use the contributions gained during festivities for public welfare etc. Based on the principles propounded by Bal Gangadhar Tilak the trust has guided hundreds of Ganeshotsav mandals.

Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama was born Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was born of Luo ethnicity in Nyanza Province, Kenya. He grew up herding goats with his own father, who was a domestic servant to the British. Although reared among Muslims, Obama, Sr., became an atheist at some point.
Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in Wichita, Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs during the Depression. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he signed up for service in World War II and marched across Europe in Patton’s army. Dunham’s mother went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the G. I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program, and moved to Hawaii.
Meantime, Barack’s father had won a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya pursue his dreams in Hawaii. At the time of his birth, Obama’s parents were students at the East–West Center of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Obama’s parents separated when he was two years old and later divorced. Obama’s father went to Harvard to pursue Ph. D. studies and then returned to Kenya.
His mother married Lolo Soetoro, another East–West Center student from Indonesia. In 1967, the family moved to Jakarta, where Obama’s half-sister Maya Soetoro–Ng was born. Obama attended schools in Jakarta, where classes were taught in the Indonesian language.
Four years later when Barack (commonly known throughout his early years as "Barry") was ten, he returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, and later his mother (who died of ovarian cancer in 1995).
He was enrolled in the fifth grade at the esteemed Punahou Academy, graduating with honors in 1979. He was only one of three black students at the school. This is where Obama first became conscious of racism and what it meant to be an African–American.
In his memoir, Obama described how he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage. He saw his biological father (who died in a 1982 car accident) only once (in 1971) after his parents divorced. And he admitted using alcohol, marijuana and cocaine during his teenage years.
After high school, Obama studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years. He then transferred to Columbia University in New York, graduating in 1983 with a degree in political science.
After working at Business International Corporation (a company that provided international business information to corporate clients) and NYPIRG, Obama moved to Chicago in 1985. There, he worked as a community organizer with low-income residents in Chicago’s Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens public housing development on the city’s South Side.