This Ganpati, if you are visiting Pooja and Dipesh Dedhia’s Mumbai home, they have one unusual request: skip the usual festive offerings and bring a notebook, pencils, colours or any fresh, unused stationery instead.

Once the celebrations are over, those offerings will travel much further than their home.

The couple hopes to turn them into stationery kits for around 400 students at an Adivasi Ashram Shala in Khadavali, giving each child fresh school supplies to use through the school year.

For Pooja and Dipesh, this is an extension of how they already celebrate Ganesh Chaturthi. Their Bappa is eco-friendly, the visarjan (immersion) happens at home, and the water from it, which contains seeds, is later used to nourish their plants.

This year, they want the celebration to reach beyond their home too, with stationery that can eventually find its way into a child’s schoolbag.

For 167 Sundays, they kept showing up 

Pooja, a qualified chef and certified nutritionist, and Dipesh, a banker by profession, are the founders of Matoshreee Foundation.

For the couple, this initiative is not an isolated act of giving. Since July 2023, they have been serving freshly prepared breakfast to more than 100 people from underserved communities every Sunday.

What started as a small effort has now become a weekly commitment. They have completed 167 consecutive Sundays........

© The Better India