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I was born in Allahabad, barely five miles from the Sangam, Hinduism’s holiest spot by popularity. This is the confluence of the most sacred river in the universe, the Ganga, with another river, the Yamuna, which terminates here. And yet, I grew up an atheist, influenced by the socialist politics germane to a city that gave India its first three prime ministers and led in the creation of its revolutionary literature from the time of the freedom struggle. It is no small irony that two of the most astounding moments of my life are embedded in the most iconic religious experience of the land.
Few people set a Guinness World Record once, fewer still twice. I joined the latter group this month, with no special feat to my credit at either time. I set my first record as a reluctant preteen on a slety January night 36 years ago after the octogenarian patriarch on my mother’s side of the family marched his wife, sons, daughters, their spouses and offspring the four miles from his house downtown to the Sangam.
Palm clutching an outstretched palm, we snaked through the frenzied millions while their screaming amplified to a colossal twister. A child’s giddy mind struggled to process the unrelenting waves of human beings disrobing at lightning speed and jumping into bone-chill water. The Guinness Book of World Records would later show that the 10 million who gathered at the Sangam for a holy bath on the occasion of the Maha Kumbh Mela that morning in January 1977 were history’s largest human gathering ever.
And then I went back this month. 10 February 2013. The exact location. To almost exactly the same experience. Swirling sand. Madding crowds. Thirty million. Thrice the 1977 number. (India’s population, too, has doubled since.)
Despite beaming images live across the world — I myself mailed pictures I shot on my iPhone — it was déjà vu country. Yet again, the dumb millions, as Mahatma Gandhi called them, driven by — what? Faith? Mythology? Spirituality? Desperation for salvation? Blind superstition? Fear of evil?
Of course, everyone at the Kumbh has their own story.
A prosperous farmer’s son in Uttar Pradesh, Arvind Singh had an epiphany at the age of 17 when in the ninth grade. Until then he had seemed headed to a future in government, perhaps as a policeman like an older brother. “I realised life as a householder would be a ruin,” he says explaining why he chose to become a naked ascetic, aka naga sadhu in the Hindu religious order. “Lust and desire kill happiness and peace.” In 1993 on the night of Diwali, the Festival of Lights, Singh began to peel off his clothes. His mother wailed. Neighbours jostled for a view. “I submitted to god.”
Kotwala Akhandanand Saraswati, as Singh is now renamed, has since traversed India’s length and breadth “preaching Sanatana Dharma”, the technical name for the Hindu religion. He leads congregational chanting of the sacred scriptures, especially the Bhagvad Gita. Stories of Lord Krishna flow lyrically from him, the better after a couple of drags of what smells like fine-grade hashish in his chillum, the ascetic’s pipe.
His success as a mendicant — and successful he is: he owns and drives a Ford Ikon around India — has repaired his troubles with what was once his family. He says he spends up to Rs 20 lakh on a single day’s community kitchen any time he calls it. “Kumbh is my birthplace as a sadhu,” says Saraswati, 37, ashen from head to toe with a generous smearing of wood ash. “This is where sadhus are born.”
Indeed, the story of the Kumbh Mela (literally, the pitcher fair) is primarily a story of asceticism and renunciation, at least in theory. It harks back to the mythical tale of gods and demons churning the ocean in rare cooperation to ferret the much sought nectar of immortality. Inevitably, the two fought for exclusive control once the said nectar emerged in a pitcher from the ocean’s deepest womb. That was when Vishnu, one of Hinduism’s three primary gods, intervened as a bird and flew away with the pitcher. In the rush though, this bird-god wasn’t very careful, and the pitcher leaked into four different rivers.
Which, as it were, has turned out well for the Hindus: the four rivers are believed to sustain that nectar. Since centuries, the Hindu religious calendar built on the lunar cycle tells us when the stars align nicely to make the nectar in the rivers most potent. The faithful merely need to plunge into the river at the right spot at the right time. A Kumbh is held by the side of each of the four rivers at different times over 12 years. With hierarchy an inescapable feature of both Hindu society and mythology, the Sangam has the highest stature of the four Kumbhs. Hence the rush of the tens of millions.
Twelve years may sound like a drag, but the momentum is never quite lost. Annual fairs build up to the Ardh (half ) Kumbh every six years, the Kumbh every 12, and the Maha (huge) Kumbh every 144, which is 12 multiplied by 12. This last is the sole preserve of the Sangam, another reason for its leadership status. This year’s record-breaking participation at the Sangam is credited to the fact that the ongoing is a Maha Kumbh Mela. (Although, the trivia junkie that I am, I am quite certain that the 1977 fair, too, was given to us as the Maha Kumbh. I may be wrong. But even if I am right, who cares?)
Of course, the sadhus and the saints get the first shot at riverine immortality as they are believed to be the champions and defenders of the Hindu faith that, at least in the revivalist sectarian imagination of the last century, has suffered onslaughts from “the Other”: Islam and Christianity in recent centuries, and from Buddhism hundreds of years ago. The foundation of Hinduism lies in the four Vedas that are believed to be divinely inspired and collated around 3,000 years ago. The word Hindu is a misnomer, appearing in none of the Sanskrit Vedas, its provenance dated to only a few hundred years ago. “Our religion is the Sanatana Dharma, which means it has existed from before the beginning of time and will continue to exist after time has lapsed,” Swami Adhokshajanand, one of the current Sankara charyas, told TEHELKA at the Maha Kumbh.
The first attempt to create a sort of Sanatana Dharma church is credited to the legend of a boy-saint born in south India two-and-a-half millennia ago and known as Adi Sankaracharya. It is believed he set up four outposts, known as the peethas, to gird up Hinduism’s trusses, and also installed a twin religious order: of saints to protect the faith by preaching the shāstra (scriptures), and of naked sadhus to do so by shastra (arms). For this, the boy-saint is said to have created a string of akhadas, or regiments, and tasked them with inducting, training and organising the preachers and the fighters.
The akhadas were placed under the control of the four religious leaders, named Jagadguru (world guru) Sankaracharyas, who headed the four peethas. Over time, the akhadas evolved to autonomy and the four Kumbh Melas, especially the one at the Sangam, became the rallying point for their saints and naked sadhus. As Hinduism’s Big Tent, the Kumbh Mela thus traditionally showcased its grandest socio-religious assembly, fertile for religious discourses as well as Vedic preachings and debates.
But much of the spartan theory is history. Time was the naked sadhus fought real battles, even against the Mughals and, at other times, for them against invaders. But now there has been no war-making with the sadhus in living memory. Besides, the once supposedly structured Hindu religious order is in disarray, overrun as it is by hundreds of self-acclaimed ascetics — the babas and the swamis — who have set up shop outside the order, earning millions in followers and billions in income. “A rosary, a mat and a staff are the only possessions an ascetic ever needs,” says Sankaracharya Adhokshajanand of the godmen. “The wealth of these babas should be confiscated.”
And what wealth they have. Joining the Indian Air Force in 1957, Pilot Baba claims he flew MIGs in two of India’s wars with Pakistan. For the past 30 years though, he is flying high only as a self proclaimed spiritual saviour of tens of thousands of his followers. At the Kumbh, his expansive antechamber at his ashram’s sprawling redoubt hardly betrays his otherworl dliness. Remember that like every other structure by the Ganga at the Kumbh, this too is temporary, built of wood and cloth and other non-permanent material. His, however, has an attached WC, a large LCD television, a springy double bed with velvety quilts, a clutch of room heaters and a treadmill.
“Fighting G-force as a pilot helped me,” Pilot Baba says when I get an exclusive audience because I knew someone who knew someone who is his disciple. “The transformation came at once, making me understand there is more to truth.” His English is broken, which is fine as an overwhelming number of disciples swarming his private quarters at the Kumbh are Russian men and women with little English skills. But even if they could understand him, they would not be affected, so blindingly their faith has fastened them to him. For me, though, it isn’t easy to grasp his “truth”. Here is an excerpt: “I believe human beings do not have courage to go above luxury life. When you become no mind, world becomes meaningless. When no mind, you are beyond world. You have no subject or object. You have no belonging. That brings the beauty of life.”
He explains that truth comes from being totally free from love, compassion, gratitude, sympathy. Yes, I heard him right. There is no past or future, he says. “They all disappear.” Once that happens, “you can do in 10 seconds what you can’t do in one year”. Whatever. I am now sneaking glances at his bracelet. I am sure it has innumerable diamonds. What else would shine so? Why wouldn’t they be real anyway? Then he says: “We are not teaching the truth. People who are teaching the Gita, the Bible, the Quran are not teaching the truth. They’re talking about the truth.” What?
After some more of his speechifying about ascending from lower to higher consciousness, of moksha having no meaning, on how to make contact between radiant energies using the gaps between them, I’m driven to ask him why sadhus smoke up. “Adi Sankaracharya, a great intellectual, told the sadhus to smoke (hashish) systematically to kill the sexual power,” he says. “I thank Sankaracharya that he gave the sadhus the dope.” Perhaps Pilot Baba knows what he is talking about.
Evidently, he meditated in the buff on the glacial Himalayas for 20 years before other saints who had lived and mediated there for thousands of years ordered him to get back into our world to lift us from the morass. Since he has stepped right back in, he has been teaching yoga, “not of the body, but of the mind”. Because the sadhus are not bothered by the body. That is why he has often taken samadhis — or immersion — in water, underground, and in “airtight” containers, for up to five days each.
The freakiness of none of this matters though to the believer. For Anna Dmitzievna, a petite 22-year old TV commercial model from Moscow aspiring to be a movie actress, being at the Kumbh is its own reward. For four years back home, she has been waking up at 4 am to offer prayers to Lord Shiva, and congregating with a shamanist sect every week. “It is only spiritual practices that bring results,” she says, speaking through an interpreter from Varanasi who is as foxed by her obsession as I am. “Praying to Shiva rids me of bad feelings and creates an aura of exceptional sensations.”
Certainly, everyone at the Kumbh has her or his own compelling need to be there. Little did Kalyan Gupta, 63, know that when he left his hometown Kolkata in 1980 in search of livelihood, he would end up owning a five-bedroom sea-facing flat in suburban Mumbai from a business arising out of his years as a shipping agent earning millions of dollars. Dressed nattily in a striped green T-shirt and a pair of jeans, looking a good decade younger than his age, Gupta is eager to walk into the sprawling Kumbh.
“This is my third Kumbh and I am here to see if I can find my guru’s guru’s guru’s guru,” Gupta tells me. That final guru is none other than Babaji Maharaj (who Gupta says has been “in body for 2,000 years and lives in the Himalayas”) referred to in the bestselling book The Autobiography of a Yogi from the 1950s. Back home, Gupta drives a Mercedes, dabbles in blue-chip shares from the house of the Tatas and companies such as Infosys, and lives a retired life. But his life’s main goal now is to run into Babaji at a Kumbh, because he knows that Babaji visits every Kumbh. “It is not easy to spot him though because he is often in disguise, mostly as a young sadhu.” Presently, his smile withers. “However, I know I won’t see him. Because I am not ready for him yet.”
Is everyone at the Kumbh then beyond the pale of my comprehension? Not really. For 25-year-old Vandith, who won’t give a second name because “it is not important at the Kumbh”, it is a chance to serve the devout. Born in the temple town of Tirupati, educated as a computer engineer at the Birla Institute of Technology in Rajasthan, he quit his job in Goa to arrive at the Kumbh early January. He has since volunteered to run a dormitory, a kitchen and an ambulance. And once in a while dipped in the holy water. “It is not about being religious or Hindu,” he explains. “It is about feeling good about myself.”
For brothers Amrit and Akash Sagar, 25 and 21, being at the Kumbh is a rite of passage, too. After all, it was their late grandfather, Ramanand Sagar, a prominent Hindi filmmaker, who created the blockbuster TV series in the 1980s on the Hindu epic, Ramayana, that tells the story of Lord Rama. As we sat around a bonfire amid upscale Swiss cottages, we spoke of the massive popularity that the TV series continues to have as evident in the still rocketing DVD sales. “We had to come to the Kumbh for the experience,” gushed Amrit. Besides, he has just finished directing his second film to launch his younger brother in a lead role. What better place than here for a blessing?
“The experience” it was, for sure, that brought Pallavi Jayaprakash, a smart 30-year-old leasing manager for an Israeli real estate firm operating in Bengaluru. She, her twin sister and six friends, as well as her Muslim boyfriend, came over because, well, “we had read an article in November and I was, like, oh god, Kumbh is next year, let’s go”. It became a kind of “cool factor.”
Pallavi is not religious, although when her father was diagnosed with cancer a decade ago, she did take to praying. Now at the Kumbh, when she went near the Sangam, she couldn’t decide if she should jump into the water. “We walked around for 45 minutes, not sure if we should.” Then they did.
“It felt good,” she says. “In my head I said that I am here to take a dip to feel recharged. To wash away the sins of my ancestors.” Really? Did she really believe that? “I did it for my mom, who believes in it. Maybe part of me believes in it, too.” Also, she and others have come in because “we have a friend who is a white American and is a DJ and is a baba. We are all so excited to meet him.”
ajit@tehelka.com
Footloose at the Kumbh
Death by preservation
WHY DOES society hold certain things as ‘valuable’? This is a question LN Tallur asks of those who look at his work. The 41-year-old artist won the ŠKODA Prize 2012, one of India’s biggest contemporary art prizes for artists under 45 years of age, by questioning the sanctity of the very space where his prize-winning show Quintessential was held — the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum (BDL) in Mumbai.
“I see myself as a museum. I try to see where a work comes from, how to see it and how to show it to the audience,” says the artist hailing from Tallur, Karnataka. He also questions why people see what they see in a museum. Take, for example Thatwamasi (that thou art). Dust sucked from a vacuum cleaner swirls around in a resplendent case that museums use to preserve artifacts. The dust becomes ‘art’ simply because of the space it occupies. “It’s tongue-in- cheek and spoofs the aura an object takes on,” says BDL Museum Director Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, adding, “the show is an investigation of how museum spaces work.”
It’s not just space. Tallur questions the value assigned to money and to religious symbols in India. As he says, “I want my work to make people think.” To do so, in his 2010 show Chromatophobia: The Fear of Money he invited his audience to nail coins into a hollowed out log affixed to bronze statues of Goddess Laxmi (or a laughing Buddha for an exhibition in Berlin). Tallur renders artifacts symbolising cultural history and the worship of wealth, worthless. By engaging the audience he makes them complicit. He appropriates traditional symbolism, tying it to contemporary concerns of empty idol worship and society’s obsession with ritual. “His low-tech machines destroy idols from popular iconography. His works are tangential to current political debate. But he deals with time and history through a gentle humour, not sharp criticism,” says art writer Girish Shahane.
Tallur has been living in South Korea for nearly a decade with his wife and daughter. He has spent years deliberately globetrotting, starting with a scholarship to study in Leeds having already studied museology in Baroda. Despite the wanderlust he has remained rooted in India. In Veni Vidi Vici, the installation on display at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi, he has used Mangalore terracotta tiles, with the legend ‘Exhibition December 1917: Golden Medal for the Tile Works’ printed on the wall next to it. It harks back to the tile factories set up by Basel missionaries, nearly 200 years ago in Mangalore, to employ Christian converts. These competed with each other for the best product, not unlike Indian artists competing with each other for the ŠKODA Prize. He cheekily calls his win history repeating itself.
Tallur’s content makes an impact because of his proficiency with form. The artist Dilip Ranade, his mentor from the erstwhile Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai, says, “He knows how to manipulate materials to create shock, fear and uneasiness. His form becomes his metaphor.” For instance, Panic room (2006) is an enclosure made of inflatable sacks that swell up and enclose one in a claustrophobic space. Eraser Pro (2011), a bronze Gandhi statue, has been polished till it’s weathered. Polishing is used to make things look better. Yet, in their desperate attempts to regain the sheen, people often forget what’s underneath the surface. “People forget what Gandhi stood for and appropriate him for various agendas,” says Mehta. Tallur’s human figures are in states of disintegration — the original thought is warped beyond recognition.
All is not shock and horror. Tallur gives his work grandeur and lushness that comes from his interest in traditional craftsmanship. As Nature Morte curator, Peter Nagy says, “The way he fuses wood with iron and bronze produces sexy, luscious pieces.” Tallur breaks the sacred space of art, with its no touching rule. Sight, smell, hearing and touch, all engage the viewer.
Tallur’s works are currently on display at the NGMA, New Delhi
aradhna@tehelka.com
Vanity Fair
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Sex, lies & videotape
Bollywood has long understood that there’s nothing like a sordid real-life tragedy to make a film about. So when Jodhpur nurse Bhanwari Devi was found dead in November 2011 after allegedly blackmailing politicians over a sex tape she possessed, filmmaker KC Bokadia was quick to announce that he would make a film about it, starring Mallika Sherawat. But the moment the shooting of the film, imaginatively titled Dirty Politics, began in Indore, it was met with protests by members of the Congress party. Bokadia was quick to assert that the film wasn’t about Bhanwari Devi at all, but about a street dancer called Anokhi Devi.
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Falling Star
How Honey Lost His Sweetness
Honey Singh’s fall from grace has been as rapid as his rise, and now it seems the man is toxic. The producers of John Abraham’s next film, I, Me Aur Main, have decided to drop the rapper, who was supposed to record a party track for them, because his public image (not his music, mind you) would alienate audiences. The film, after all, is about its protagonist’s relationships with the four women in his life, and the makers of the film felt that the rapper’s choice of lyrics would keep away sections of their female viewers.
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CASH COW
Michael Jordan turned 50 last Sunday and one figure that raised eyebrows was that His Airness still earns $80 million a year, even almost a decade after his final game. Forbes reports that most of his earnings come from Nike’s Jordan brand, which still controls 58 percent of the US basketball shoe market, and earns him nearly $60 million in royalties. Only boxer Floyd Mayweather ($85 million) makes more than him among athletes, while the highest earning current basketball player, Kobe Bryant, makes a measly $59.8 million.
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‘Yash Chopra is a living legend’
Karan Johar (In our hearts, KJo, in our hearts)
Film Review: Zero Dark Thirty
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Starring: Jessica Chastain, Kyle Chandler, James Gandolfini
AS PART of a scrambling among critics the world over to acknowledge the genius of Kathryn Bigelow after the release of her Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker, Roger Ebert called her “a master of stories about men and women who choose to be in physical danger. She cares first about the people,” he went on, “then about the danger. She doesn’t leave a lot of room for much else.” In Zero Dark Thirty, her next film that has been nominated for five Oscars, Bigelow tells the story of the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden through the story of one woman’s doggedness. Unlike The Hurt Locker, though, the psychology seems forced, leaving the film with an identity crisis of sorts.
The trope of the lone wolf battling enemies within and without before eventually triumphing is an old Hollywood favourite, a by-product of the celebration of individualism that is at the centre of the American ethos. Bigelow’s Maya (Chastain) is part-Clint Eastwood, part-Carrie Mathison (from Homeland), part- Avner Kaufman (Munich). Initially a reluctant, semi-neurotic inductee into the CIA’s Islamabad bureau (because that is clearly the best place to start for a new recruit), her initial battles are fought not to find Osama, but to establish that she is the smartest person in the room. Over the years, she finds herself more and more invested in the chase, a consequence of being more and more alone, as her teammates either die or leave for other assignments. Eventually, she’s the lone crusader, obsessing over a single lead that she believes will lead her to Osama, despite all warnings of confirmation bias, as the agency begins to focus on preventing future attacks rather than find a man who might already be dead. For someone who has been lauded for her originality, Bigelow surprisingly restricts her characters to established Hollywood archetypes: the naïve but intelligent girl paired with the gruff but sensitive partner, the middle manager out to save his own skin, the folksy director who sees promise in someone his underlings don’t appreciate (though the idea of Tony Soprano as CIA Director is pretty awesome).
Mercifully, the film is more than a rah-rah piece of American chauvinism. It suggests, for instance, that much of the information that led to Osama’s killing was acquired through torture, though that claim has been questioned by members of Congress (The jury, most likely, will be out for quite some time to come). Telling a “true story based on first-hand accounts”, its premise is more journalistic than dramatic, which is why Maya’s personal crusade seems out of place. Writing in the Pacific Standard, former CIA operative Nada Bakos said, “Zero Dark Thirty occupied an odd space. It’s not ridiculous enough to allow complete suspension of disbelief… but it’s not accurate enough to resonate with my experiences”. Osama was captured not by one woman working off two data points, she adds, but by an entire agency using thousands of data points. Of course, the limitations of plot make a purely journalistic treatment impossible, but that is the identity crisis the film suffers. The personal stories aren’t compelling enough, while the account of the manhunt isn’t accurate enough. Neither is the action slick enough for the film to work purely for that.
Bigelow’s personal story and unique sensibility make her a director one wants to support. More than the quality of her work, it is the fact that she was willing to take risks and challenge convention that won her many admirers. But with Zero Dark Thirty, she has produced the unthinkable: a conventional Hollywood film.
Film Review: Murder 3
Director: Vishesh Bhatt
Starring: Randeep Hooda, Aditi Rao Hydari, Sara Loren, Rajesh Shringarpore
MURDER 3 is a reviewer’s nightmare, in that most of what can be said about the film involves a major revelation in the second half, which, of course, despite the title of this column, I cannot reveal. So there go the dozens of jokes and observations I thought of while watching this illogical mess. They were good. Trust me.
The film is an official remake — the ‘official’ being a rarity in the Bhatt camp — of the Colombian thriller La Cara Oculta, which provides it with another rarity: an unconventional plot for Bollywood. However illogical the said plot is in its details, it is a breath of fresh air to consider that one of the umpteen ‘sequels’ the Bhatts have produced, none of which seem to have anything to do with the previous films, is anything other than the formulaic fare they normally peddle. It is so unlikely that the unsuspecting viewer might quite possibly have left the theatre by the time the twist comes, which would be a shame, since it’s quite an entertaining hour once you understand what the film is all about, even if the said entertainment is mostly derived from pointing and laughing.
Until that point, however, the film is quite predictably bad. It checks all the Bhatt boxes: exotic locales (South Africa, in this case) for the sake of exotic locales, cheesy background music in a desperate attempt at generating drama, unintentionally funny dialogues, wooden actors, the inevitable power-cut-and-storm sequence. Randeep Hooda is so expressionless in his role that one actually hankers for the glory days of Emraan Hashmi, who occasionally pulled off the odd facial expression. His success with the ladies is depressing for all of us under the impression that an iota of personality is necessary to have any hope of not dying alone. In fact, even when he is so drunk out of his wits that solving third order differential equations seems easier than getting from Point A to B, waitress Nisha (Loren) goes much beyond the line of duty to take him home rather than bundle him into a taxi. Almost immediately afterward, she’s installed in his mansion, going from complete stranger to live-in partner in a matter of days. This is, of course, only days after his previous girlfriend Roshni (Hydari) has left him.
Mahesh Bhatt, who recently tweeted that he is waiting for a rave review even after 40 years in the business, has gone on about how this film is womancentric, unlike the misogyny his family’s films are usually accused of. He is right superficially, I suppose, as the decisions that lead to the climax are all made by the two women. But apart from these moments, inherited from the original, there is little that is flesh and blood about the characters, and what little there is is lost on the actresses, who are more or less the mannequins the Bhatts regularly employ.
The twist is, as I said, illogical, with any number of holes. It is the result of a moment of abject stupidity by Roshni, which does no favours for improving the image of the women who are so central to the film. The sequence of events that follows is entirely implausible, with the various leaps of reasoning that drive the action occurring within seconds in a woman who has showed little evidence of original thought thus far, though the morally ambiguous ending is rather neat
The tagline for Murder 3 was “This Valentine… love will be murdered”. So was common sense.
ajachi@tehelka.com
A confluence of chaos
IT WAS rather trying to stay alive early morning on 10 February in the city of Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh, on the banks of what is arguably the world’s holiest river, the Ganga. Raging to jump in it all at once to score eternal salvation, an estimated 30 million Hindu faithful had massed near it, breathing life into the cliche of ‘a sea of humanity’. But a total collapse of ground management turned that sea terribly choppy. About 40 pilgrims lost their lives in two stampedes as the day wore on. First, a frenzied run by hundreds of thousands near the river’s holiest part, the sangam, where it meets the Yamuna river, snuffed out two lives. (Local newspapers said at least four had died.) Hours later, outbound devotees packing the city’s largest train station stampeded, killing 36 more. Their moment in history’s biggest ever gathering also turned out to be their last.
But tragic as the deaths were, they should hardly be surprising news. The inside story of the Maha Kumbh Mela — the two-month juggernaut held every dozen years as the pinnacle of the Hindu religious calendar — is a sordid tale of horrific unpreparedness caused by clashing egos, undermined authority, a lack of coordination between various agencies and institutionalised corruption. The most shocking, perhaps, is the claim of an official source that the administration knew its infrastructure was unfit to handle the tens of millions. “Privately, most of us thought no more than 20 million would turn up,” an official told TEHELKA, declining to be quoted. But the figure of 30 million the administration had spun for weeks turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Essentially, the Ganga at Allahabad had 22 functioning bathing banks that day along a shoreline of about 5.5 km. Although everyone wants to take a dip at the sangam at the auspicious hour, authorities planned to bring devotees coming in from various directions to the different bathing banks. “We decided to tell the devotees that wherever they had reached was the sangam,” says an official. Hoping to thus trick the unsuspecting pilgrims, the authorities planned to turn them after the baths back towards where they came from. Over 7,000 buses were deployed at the various exits. The railway plotted outgoing journeys from six train stations. The millions were to disperse along the squid’s arms.
That fateful day, however, all traffic management plans failed as the unprecedented crowd of devotees, which began arriving the previous day, overwhelmed the constabulary and surged towards the sangam from all directions. When by the morning the crowd threatened to overrun the traditional first bathers — the yogis, babas and sadhus — the police panicked and started pushing the commoners out of the Mela ground, itself a smidgen of just 28 sq km. As is now known, the millions thus driven out began marching towards the biggest train station, the Allahabad Junction, which falls on the Delhi-Howrah railway route. Within hours, Allahabad city, itself densely populated with over a million inhabitants, was gridlocked.
“It took me 15 hours by car to reach my home 7 km from the Mela,” said businessman Anil Agrawal, who rents out a slew of Swiss cottages by the river to foreigners and well-heeled Indians. “It was the longest journey of my life for the shortest distance.” To slow down the crowds, the Mela authorities had rigged a maze of zigzag lanes, akin to those at airport checkins, in a ground the size of a football field. But the police failed to send the people into them just when it was needed. Deploying thousands of buses at exit points became counterproductive; once they were stranded in city traffic, the people riding them began fleeing on foot. A network of guides the government had stationed across the city in the previous Kumbh Mela of 2001 was conspicuously absent this time. Perplexingly, the decades old practice of making announcements on loudspeakers strung on bamboo and electric poles all over the city was absent, too. At the railway station, where the fatalities occurred, it took over two hours for medical assistance to reach, although the railway hospital is located just metres away. The Railway Police chief, who lives nearby, took longer to walk the distance.
What triggered such a colossal collapse of planning?
First, the lack of coordination. The management of the Kumbh Mela involves more than a dozen government agencies, functioning under the state and Central governments, playing critical roles. These include the police, sanitation, water supply, public works, electricity, healthcare, road transport and the railways. The Kumbh Mela is designated as a temporary administrative district of the state, with its own district magistrate and senior superintendent of police. The Uttar Pradesh government appointed a minister, Azam Khan, as the nodal minister for the event. Top guns such as the railway minister and Railway Board chairman visited over months. And yet, there is no single public official with whom the buck stops as it should. Moreover, no overall blueprint that incorporates the work of the various agencies was ever prepared.
A key reason for the chaos on 10 February was that coordination between the Mela authorities and the Allahabad district administration had long broken down . The two have run afoul of each other for months. Allahabad District Magistrate Raj Shekhar, an IAS officer, and Kumbh Mela administrator Mani Prasad Mishra, who started his career from the lower state-level PCS service, have barely interacted in months. Shekhar was not even invited to several planning meetings. Ironically, commentators judge both as fairly competent. But Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav’s mandarins in Lucknow favoured neither. Instead, last year, they brought in Devesh Chaturvedi, a senior IAS officer with experience of the 2001 Kumbh Mela, as commissioner of Allahabad, making him the boss of both the Mela and the Allahabad districts.
HACKS COVERING the event have been astounded how Chaturvedi’s arrival relegated Mishra, who should be leading from the front as the designated Mela administrator, to the sidelines. When the state’s top bureaucrat, Chief Secretary Jawed Usmani, came down to inspect the Mela preparations in early January, it was Chaturvedi who accompanied him, while Mishra was tellingly absent. On the morning of 10 February, the commissioner and a handful of policemen were ineffectually trying to control the crowds at the sangam, while Mishra was nowhere to be seen.
Mela authorities grumble that Mishra was sidelined because Yadav’s predecessor, former CMMayawati, had appointed him over a year ago. The high court had earlier stipulated that a Mela chief once appointed cannot be removed without its approval. Ergo, he was pushed out of the loop, they say. Indeed, most tenders given during Mayawati’s tenure for construction and supplies were junked once Yadav came to power last March. Shivpal Yadav, the state’s public works minister, who is also the chief minister’s uncle and had famously told a gathering of bureaucrats last year that they should be only moderately corrupt, took his time to award fresh tenders.
With less than a month for the Mela to end, many basic facilities are not in place. Thousands of toilet seats are lying in a storehouse, while people defecate in the open. Ration shops are shut most of the day. Hardly anyone is able to buy the subsidised rice, pulses, flour and kerosene oil that should retail there. Of the 2 lakh ration cards that were to be issued to the poor before the Mela started, not even 80,000 were made until last week. Garbage has piled up across the landscape. At many places, the ground has turned into watery sludge, one such becoming the cause of deaths in 10 February’s first stampede.
ajit@tehelka.com
Making good health affordable
Photo: Ishan Tankha
IT WAS something nobody had anticipated and even fewer thought possible, till it happened. For many years, activists had been protesting that drugs of last resort for diseases like cancer and HIV sold by multinational pharmaceutical companies in India were completely unaffordable. The companies had made token reductions, but they were just that.
Then, out of the blue, in March 2012, the Indian Patent Office (IPO) issued the first compulsory licence in India. It broke Bayer AG’s patent on kidney and liver cancer drug Nexavar, allowing Hyderabad-based company Natco Pharma to manufacture it.
Overnight, the price of Nexavar plummeted from Rs 2,84,428 a month to Rs 8,880 a month. That’s a massive 97 percent reduction in the price of a drug that according to liver specialist Dr Arvinder Singh Soin is used by a third of his patients, extending their lives by a “few precious months”.
The patent office argued that the drug fulfilled the criteria for compulsory license. Even though it was vital for cancer patients, the company had not made it “available to the public at a reasonably affordable price”, it said.
The government had the power to issue compulsory licenses since 2005, but had been afraid of antagonising the industry. Other developing countries like Thailand had been far more assertive during this period, issuing nearly half-a-dozen such licenses.
This was a bold step, and a foretaste of the intellectual property battles to come.
In November 2012, the Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB) of the ministry of commerce and industry set aside a patent for Pegasys, a drug used for the treatment of Hepatitis C, which had been granted to pharmaceutical multinational Hoffman-La Roche.
This patent, granted in 2006, was ironically one of the first patents granted under a World Trade Organisation mandated patent regime that was introduced in India in 2005.
The IPAB set a precedent by allowing a Mumbai-based NGO to challenge the patent many years after it had been granted. It overruled the company’s objection that the NGO had no locus standi in the case, observing that “public interest is a persistent presence in intellectual property law”, and the drug, a chemical modification of a naturally occurring protein, interferon, was an “obvious” invention.
This ruling is a lifeline to 10 million people in the country who are infected with Hepatitis C since it’s expected to lead to a drastic price reduction, from Rs 4,36,000 (for a six-month course) that Pegasys currently costs.
A little over a fortnight later, the IPAB dismissed an appeal by AstraZeneca challenging an earlier order that had refused it a patent for its cancer drug Gefitinib. The government is now planning to introduce compulsory licences for three more commonly used cancer drugs, including Trastuzumab (marketed by Roche under the trade name ‘Herceptin’).
“These have been very positive developments,” says activist Kalyani Menon-Sen, who had been fighting to make this life-saving breast cancer drug freely available. “The government seems to be realising that taking a hard line on patents is the only way we’re going to be able to make healthcare affordable and available.”
Arun Nanda, scientific advisor to the IPO, also supports these moves, saying pharmaceutical companies have been unwilling to negotiate reductions in drug prices. “They claim their research and development activities are going to be adversely affected, but refuse to divulge either their sales figures or the profits they make from these drugs,” he says.
Predictably, the pharmaceutical industry is gearing up for a fight. Sujay Shetty, who heads PricewaterhouseCooper’s pharmaceutical and life sciences practice in India, says these developments have left the industry puzzled.
In a case that is being seen as a bellwether for India’s patent regime, the Supreme Court is due to rule on Novartis’ cancer drug Glivec, which was denied a patent way back in 2006. Novartis is challenging the interpretation of a clause in the Indian Patent Act that requires any new invention to show “significant improvement” of therapeutic efficacy. At stake is the hard line that the government has taken on “evergreening” — minor modifications in drugs to get extended patent protection.
THESE PATENT battles were part of a larger move to control drug prices. And at the end of last year, in the first amendment since 1995 to the list of drugs with controlled prices, the government notified the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Policy 2012. This was a long overdue step. The previous policy was so antiquated that of the 74 bulk drugs and formulations that it controlled, only 47 were still being manufactured in India.
The new policy marked a radical departure from its predecessor, which had selected drugs for price caps based on their market share at the time and based the controlled prices on their cost of production, allowing the manufacturers a certain profit margin. Under the new policy, the drugs to be brought under price control were pegged to the National List of Essential Medicines 2011, which lists medicines thought to be essential for public health, making the policy more pertinent to current needs.
The number of medicines under price control rose to 348. Along with their different formulations, these now cover nearly 30 percent of the medicines sold in the country, including everything from paracetamol to anti-tuberculosis medicines.
The policy also changed the pricing mechanism, turning to the market to determine prices. The prices of essential drugs are now determined by taking a simple average of the prices of all brands that have a market share greater than one percent.
For instance, the common antibiotic Ciprofloxacin is manufactured by 94 companies in the country, and sold at prices between Rs 11 and Rs 164. Under the new price control regime, its price is likely to be capped at a figure about halfway between these two.
The department of chemicals and fertilisers, which is responsible for the pharmaceutical policy, resisted industry pressure to take the weighted average of drug prices, asserting this would have tilted the balance towards the most expensive branded medicines that also tend to have the highest market shares.
The move to market-based pricing has, however, been challenged by activists like Mira Shiva of the All India Drug Action Network, who contend that contrary to what the government claims, it will lead to increased drug prices.
In its pharmaceutical policy paper the government counters this, arguing there is enough competition in the domestic pharmaceutical market to keep prices low. Market-based pricing, it says, is easier to monitor, and will hopefully give companies an incentive to revive the manufacturing of bulk (base) drugs in India, most of which are currently imported from China.
Efforts are also on to limit the number of ‘combination drugs’ in the market. Companies often use these drugs (known as fixed dose combinations) — which combine a drug that is under price control with other inessential drugs that are not — to evade price controls.
In the absence of government regulation, these drugs have mushroomed. “There are 384 fixed dose combinations of paracetamol in the market,” points out Nanda. Even drugs like the common painkiller Proxyvon, made using paracetamol, are available in 11 different combinations. “Even doctors can’t remember all of these,” he says.
The most worrying fallout has been that patients have been consuming more drugs than they need. “It’s time drug use was rationalised,” says Dr Ranjit Roy Chaudhury of Apollo Hospitals Educational and Research Foundation. “Nearly 50 percent of the medicines currently being used are unnecessary.”
A recent parliamentary committee report on the functioning of the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation, the country’s apex drug control authority, pointed out that state drug authorities had been issuing licences for the manufacture of a large number of fixed dose combinations without its clearance.
A committee on drug and food regulation for the 12th Five Year Plan also recommended that “except for all fixed dose combinations included in WHO’s essential Drug List, all fixed dose combinations in India be reviewed in terms of their therapeutic effect”.
The drug regulator has finally woken up to the menace, withdrawing the manufacturing licenses for 294 such combinations, and reining in errant drug control authorities in various states.
And in December 2012, the government imposed restrictive conditions on foreign investment in existing pharmaceutical firms — an unexpected reversal of a policy that had allowed 100 percent, ‘automatic’ FDI in domestic pharmaceutical companies, resulting in the acquisition of Indian companies like Ranbaxy, Piramal Healthcare and Shanta Biotech by foreign pharmaceutical firms.
MOST OF the FDI coming into pharmaceuticals has been, according to Sakthivel Selvaraj of Delhi-based Public Health Foundation of India, “an effort to cash in on India’s huge generics market”, the third largest market in the world by volume. Little FDI has gone into establishing new infrastructure and into research and development of new drugs, especially those that India urgently needs.
The new rules come with the rider that a foreign company acquiring more than 49 percent of an Indian pharmaceutical company will have to maintain the same level of investment in research activities and the production of essential drugs for the next five years.
Controlling FDI inflows allows the Indian government to exercise a greater control over the industry, especially in the manufacture and pricing of essential drugs. This dovetails with the Planning Commission’s ambitious goal of introducing universal healthcare, with free medicines in all government facilities in the country, during the 12th Five Year Plan (2012-17).
The tentative allocation for the ministry of health and family welfare for this period has gone up by 202 percent from the previous allocation of Rs 99,491 crores during the 11th Plan. According to the 12th Plan draft document, over Rs 25,000 crore of the amount will be set aside for the supply of free generic medicines.
“In ten years, no Indian will unable to afford at least 25 basic, good quality medicines,” says Dr Chaudhury optimistically. The current roil in the system is the first step towards that.
In a tacit acceptance of this, VM Katoch, head of the Indian Council for Medical Research, admitted at a meeting in July 2012 that the regulatory environment in the country was changing. He felt there were lots of expectations from the drug authorities.
“The regulatory system in the country,” he concluded, “should have the trust of the people.”
akshai@tehelka.com
The Mobs Must be Crazy
Director: Kamal Haasan
Starring: Kamal Haasan, Andrea Jeremiah, Pooja Kumar, Rahul Bose
AT THE fateful session at Jaipur, minutes before Ashis Nandy’s unfortunately worded statement, fellow panelist Richard Sorabjee spoke about the limits of free speech and how hate speech is defined in India. “Deliberate malice” is the phrase he used, saying that only something that was deliberately intended to denigrate a person or community could justifiably be censored. Nandy’s comments clearly did not fall under this criterion, and if the same standard is applied to Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam (released in Hindi as Vishwaroop), the recent protests against its release seem decidedly unjustified, silly even.
In V for Vendetta, when Evey Hammond finds that Stephen Fry’s character owns a Quran, she asks him whether he is a Muslim. “No, I’m in television,” he replies. That would be a better reading of Haasan’s film: by no means a slicker version of Innocence of Muslims, but a very commercial film where religion is incidental to a plot that simply aims to entertain, rather than make a sociological point. Haasan has said that this film is a tribute to Muslims, that they will send him a “lot of biriyani for Eid next year”. That is unlikely, and one suspects that such statements were made more as hyperbole than anything else. The protesters claim that the film is regressive because the terrorists are Muslim, while Haasan claims it is progressive because the RAW agent chasing them is also one. Neither is particularly valid; both have occurred in cinema before to mixed results.
The plot is fairly simple. Vishwanath (Haasan) is a Kathak dancer who is actually a RAW agent working to thwart a terrorist plot by a group he had earlier infiltrated in Afghanistan. Said plot involves exploding a dirty bomb, for which they have been stealing cesium from radiotherapy machines made by a company for which Vishwanath’s wife Nirupama (Kumar) works. The wife, of course, is clueless about her husband’s secret life, which leads to some humour inspired by True Lies. Once everyone knows everything, the film is a fairly run-of-themill series of chase sequences, all of which rather cynically build up to a sequel, the horrendous trailer for which is shown at the end of the movie. Interspersed are flashbacks of Vishwanath’s years in Afghanistan, which by no means depict the terrorists as black-and-white bad guys, but people fighting for an ideal (with no judgement made on the validity of that ideal). Neither are they shown as overtly heroic. “First it was the British who came, then the Soviets, the Americans, and now the Taliban,” a woman tells them after an American raid on her village. “What are men but monkeys with tails in the front?”
On the contrary, if anyone comes out of this movie looking bad, it has to be the Americans. “We fight for Allah, but the Americans fight for petrol,” says one terrorist. “If you laid out barrels of petrol in front of them, they would bow down in namaaz.” Later, the FBI agents who arrest our heroes are shown to be typically racist, with much unfortunate humour drawn from their moronic statements. One interrogator, on finding out they worship Gods with four arms, comes up with this gem: “So, how do you crucify him?” The events of the film take place after the killing of Osama (the terror plot involved is revenge), and Haasan and his RAW colleagues rather maturely condemn the euphoria among the Americans after the event, while acknowledging that it might be justified after the pain of 9/11.
When judged shorn of political blinkers, Vishwaroop is a fairly entertaining – if rather illogical – action thriller that, if anything, errs on the side of caution when it comes to Muslim sentiments.
ajachi@tehelka.com
Not So Honest Abe
The New York Times began Disunion, a blog on their website telling the story of the Civil War as it unfolded 150 years ago. The title of its first entry, Will Lincoln Prevail?, is a question Oscar-watchers will be asking themselves, now that Argo has emerged the firm frontrunner with Best Picture victories at the Golden Globes, the Screen Actor Guild Awards and even — horror of horrors — the BAFTAs. The questions the blogpost asked, however, were more important than mere awards season punditry: could the Illinois lawyer take advantage of a fractured Democratic field and become the first ever Republican President? And how would the southern states react to a candidate from an anti-slavery party in the White House?
The answers, of course, are known. However, what the blog managed to do was dispell some of the notions about Abraham Lincoln being an unbridled idealist. His election victory, after all, was predicated on winning New York, where competing gangs of armed hoodlums assaulted and intimidated voters in scenes that would not be out of place in Indian elections today. Neither was he unambiguously against slavery: he constantly avoided taking a public position on the issue, repeatedly leaving the question to the states. The sense one gets from a deeper reading of the Civil War is that Lincoln — like that other Illinois lawyer elected to the White House 148 years later — was a committed pragmatist who couched his pragmatism in the high idealism of his speeches.
It is that pragmatism that Steven Spielberg taps into in his masterful biopic, which finally released in India last week. The film deals with the passage of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution that rendered slavery illegal, “the greatest measure of the 19th Century; passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America”, as abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Jones) puts it. The national myth about Lincoln says that he freed the slaves with a stroke of his pen, through the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Reading Disunion today, 150 years after the proclamation came into effect, shows that the proclamation, a wartime measure, did not effectively do much. “It’s hard to say,” writes James Oakes on its impact, “because the significance of that document has always been obscured by both myth and cynicism — either it freed all the slaves, or it didn’t free a single one — so much so that 150 years after it was issued we still cannot answer the simplest but most important question: what did the Emancipation Proclamation actually do?”
Lincoln’s solution was a Constitutional amendment that required a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives. To secure the votes necessary, he did not use, as one would expect, inspirational speeches, preferring instead to procure them in exchange for government posts in his upcoming second term. Lincoln’s antithesis in the film, the thundering idealist Stevens, despite his personal distaste for “Lincoln the inveterate dawdler, Lincoln the Southerner, Lincoln the capitulating compromiser, our adversary, and leader of the Godforsaken Republican Party, our party”, finds that he must compromise as well in order to get the amendment passed. The most powerful moment in the film is when he is forced to say that he is not in favour of equality in all things, but only in equality before the law. But even though he uses underhanded means (to great comedic effect), one never finds oneself bristling with self-righteous anger. Daniel Day Lewis’ brilliance in the role plays no little part, but the fact is that Lincoln’s corruption humanises him in the same way that reading about Nelson Mandela’s political machinations and acceptance to compromise in No Easy Walk to Freedom humanised Mandela.
Vishwaroopam: Erring on the side of caution
At the fateful session at Jaipur, minutes before Ashis Nandy’s unfortunately worded statement, fellow panelist Richard Sorabjee spoke about the limits of free speech and how hate speech is defined in India. “Deliberate malice” is the phrase he used, saying that only something that was deliberately intended to denigrate a person or community could justifiably be censored. Nandy’s comments clearly did not fall under this criterion, and if the same standard is applied to Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam (released in Hindi as Vishwaroop), the recent protests against its release seem decidedly unjustified, silly even.
In V for Vendetta, when Evey Hammond finds that Stephen Fry’s character owns a Quran, she asks him whether he is a Muslim. “No, I’m in television,” he replies. That would be a better reading of Haasan’s film: by no means a better version of Innocence of Muslims, but a very commercial film where religion is incidental to a plot that simply aims to entertain rather than make a sociological point. Haasan has said that this film is a tribute to Muslims, that they will send him a “lot of biriyani for Eid next year”. That is unlikely, and one suspects that such statements were made more for publicity reasons than anything else. The protestors claim that the film is regressive because the terrorists are Muslim, while he claims it is progressive because the RAW agent chasing them is also one. Neither is particularly valid; both have occurred in film before to mixed results.
The plot – for anybody who doesn’t know already – is fairly simple. Vishwanath (Haasan) is a Kathak dancer who is actually a RAW agent working to thwart a terrorist plot by Omar (Bose), the commander of a terrorist group he had earlier infiltrated in Afghanistan. The plot involves exploding a dirty bomb, for which Omar’s cohorts have been stealing cesium from radiotherapy machines made by a company for which Vishwanath’s wife Nirupama (Kumar) works. The wife, of course, is clueless about her husband’s secret life, which leads to some humour inspired by True Lies. Once everyone knows everything, it is a fairly run-of-the-mill chase sequence, all of which rather cynically builds up to a sequel, the horrendous trailer for which is shown at the end of the movie. Interspersed are flashbacks of his years in Afghanistan, which by no means depicts the terrorists as black-and-white bad guys, but people fighting for an ideal (with no judgement made on the validity of that ideal). Neither are they shown as overtly heroic. “First it was the British who came, then the Soviets, the Americans, and now the Taliban,” a woman tells Omar after an American raid on her village. “What are men but monkeys with tails in the front?”
On the contrary, if anyone comes out of this movie looking bad, it has to be the Americans. “We fight for Allah, but the Americans fight for petrol,” says one terrorist. “If you laid out barrels of petrol in front of them, they would bow down in namaaz.” Later, the FBI agents who arrest our heroes are shown to be typically racist, with much unfortunate humour drawn from their moronic statements. One interrogator, for instance, on finding out that that Ashmita’s God has four arms, comes up with this gem: “So how do you crucify him?” The events of the film take place after the killing of Osama (the terror plot involved is revenge), and Haasan and his RAW colleagues rather maturely condemn the euphoria among the Americans after the event, while acknowledging that it might be justified after the pain of 9/11.
Judged when shorn of religious blinkers, Vishwaroop is a fairly competent action thriller, with some cerebral plot twists, that, if anything, errs on the side of caution when it comes to Muslim sentiments.
