Puja

A puja is a type of Hindu prayer ceremony. They can be super small; apparently most people do a puja every day, sometimes twice a day, say a prayer to a statue of a god in their home and give it an offering, and sometimes they are BIG.
Yesterday I was witness to a medium sized one. When I went out for my morning walk I noticed that there was a tent being set up in the little park-type area in front of my house which would make it impossible for me to walk around it. So I just walked around my neighborhood. On the way back I asked a man if the tent was for a wedding (there have been a few weddings out there) and he told me it was for a puja.
About an hour later it started. I didn't get a great view of it from my balcony (silly trees in the way), but from what I could see, there was a mini-stage with at least two statues of gods, I saw one ganesh (the god with the elephant head) but couldn't tell who the other one was...of course ganesh is the only one I recognize because of the elephant head. There were about 75 people there and for about 2 hours there was singing and chanting and they were making offerings to the gods; flowers and fruits and such.
Then, in true Indian style, they had lunch...big meals are very important in India.
I don't know much about the Hindu religion, I did study it in college but the sheer complexity of it confused me quite a bit. Although I think that the average Hindu doesn't know all the ins and out of it either as I had mentioned to someone that I read the Bhagavad Gita in college (sort of the Hindu version of the bible) and they didn't know what I was talking about. But is seems to me that it is a very flexible religion that can be adjusted to the individual person. You can participate in a big puja, or just do small ones, you can do as many or as few as you want, and you can worship as many or as few gods as you want. Much like most of everything in India it is very different from what I'm used to and it doesn't really make sense to me, but it is interesting to learn about.