Sachin Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag lead cricketers in greeting fans on Ganesh Chaturthi

New Delhi, Sep 13: As the ten-day-long Ganesh Chaturthi festival kicked off with zeal and fervour across India on Thursday (September 13), cricketers took to their Twitter handle to greet their followers.

The festival, which is celebrated with great fervor in Maharashtra, began with devotees, mostly attired in traditional clothes, bringing colourfully-crafted idols of the elephant-headed God in their homes and pandals and installing them amid chants of 'Ganapati bappa moraya', the beating of drums and the sprinkling of 'gulal'.

Several beautifully decked up pandals have been erected in all major cities and towns in the state, including Mumbai, Pune, Nashik and Nagpur, where huge idols of Lord Ganesha have been placed on raised platforms for people to worship.

The festival is now being celebrated with the same vigour in other parts of the country. Several makeshift tents are set up where the statue of the deity is established. These makeshift tents also serve as a venue for promoting social causes such as free medical checkup, blood donation camps, the charity for poor during the festival days.

Ganesh Chaturthi, also known as Vinayak Chaturthi, is celebrated across the country as birthday of Lord Ganesha which comes to an end after 10 days when people come out in large numbers for immersing the idols in the sea or in different water bodies.

The festival sees devotees offering to the deity various sweets as prasad, of which 'modak' (sweet rice flour dumplings filled with coconut and jaggery) is an integral part. According to the Hindu mythology, modak is believed to be Lord Ganesha's favourite sweet.

Here's how cricketers and other sports persons greeted fellow countrymen on this occasion: