How many pandals you can actually do in a day

Per puja, budget: the walk to it, the queue, five to ten minutes actually inside, and the walk out. On a peak evening in a busy neighbourhood that totals twenty to forty minutes. In a quiet block-organised area, or any morning, it is closer to ten.

So a peak evening from seven to midnight, done well, is six to ten pujas. A morning from seven to eleven in one neighbourhood is twelve to twenty. A full day that mixes both, with a rest in the middle, is realistically twenty to twenty-five.

Anyone telling you they did forty in a day either went on Panchami, or drove past thirty of them.

Chaturthi and Panchami: everything is finished and the crowds have not started. Double any number below.

Shashthi: busy but civil. Perhaps three-quarters of a Panchami count.

Saptami to Navami: the numbers above. Ashtami night is the slowest of the five.

Dashami: the mornings are for sindoor khela and the afternoons for immersion. It is not a pandal-counting day.

Not the queues — the moving between clusters. Two neighbourhoods in one evening costs you an hour of transit in the middle, and that hour is three or four pujas. One well-chosen neighbourhood beats two adjacent ones almost every time.

This is why the walking-route guides on this site are built per neighbourhood rather than per zone: a route made of pujas you can walk between is a route you will finish.

It is worth saying plainly. A number is easy to compare and completely disconnected from whether the evening was any good, and people who optimise for it end up walking past the thing they came for.

The pujas that stay with you afterwards are almost never the ones you queued ninety minutes for. They are a small para installation you had not heard of, somebody handing you a plate, a dhaki playing at one in the morning to eleven people.

Pick a neighbourhood. Walk all of it. Stop when you want to rather than when the list says. Eat twice. If something is interesting, stay in it for twenty minutes instead of five.

You will do eight pujas instead of fourteen, and you will be able to describe six of them a week later, which is more than anybody who did fourteen can.