{"id":96680,"date":"2013-02-21T18:19:50","date_gmt":"2013-02-21T12:49:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tehelka.com\/?p=96680"},"modified":"2013-02-21T18:19:50","modified_gmt":"2013-02-21T12:49:50","slug":"footloose-at-the-kumbh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/footloose-at-the-kumbh\/","title":{"rendered":"Footloose at the Kumbh"},"content":{"rendered":"

[slideshow post_id=”96680″]
\nI was born in Allahabad, barely five miles from the Sangam, Hinduism\u2019s 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.
\nFew 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\u2019s side of the family marched his wife, sons, daughters, their spouses and offspring the four miles from his house downtown to the Sangam.
\nPalm clutching an outstretched palm, we snaked through the frenzied millions while their screaming amplified to a colossal twister. A child\u2019s 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 \u00a0World Records<\/em> 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\u2019s largest human gathering ever.
\nAnd 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\u2019s population, too, has doubled since.)
\nDespite beaming images live across the world \u2014 I myself mailed pictures I shot on my iPhone \u2014 it was d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu country. Yet again, the dumb millions, as Mahatma Gandhi called them, driven by \u2014 what? Faith? Mythology? Spirituality? Desperation for salvation? Blind superstition? Fear of evil?
\nOf course, everyone at the Kumbh has their own story.
\nA prosperous farmer\u2019s 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. \u201cI realised life as a householder would be a ruin,\u201d he says explaining why he chose to become a naked ascetic, aka naga sadhu<\/em> in the Hindu religious order. \u201cLust and desire kill happiness and peace.\u201d 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. \u201cI submitted to god.\u201d
\nKotwala Akhandanand Saraswati, as Singh is now renamed, has since traversed India\u2019s length and breadth \u201cpreaching Sanatana Dharma\u201d, the technical name for the Hindu religion. He leads congregational chanting of the sacred scriptures, especially the Bhagvad Gita<\/em>. 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\u2019s pipe.
\nHis success as a mendicant \u2014 and successful he is: he owns and drives a Ford Ikon around India \u2014 has repaired his troubles with what was once his family. He says he spends up to Rs 20 lakh on a single day\u2019s community kitchen any time he calls it. \u201cKumbh is my birthplace as a sadhu,\u201d says Saraswati, 37, ashen from head to toe with a generous smearing of wood ash. \u201cThis is where sadhus are born.\u201d
\nIndeed, 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\u2019s deepest womb. That was when Vishnu, one of Hinduism\u2019s three primary gods, intervened as a bird and flew away with the pitcher. In the rush though, this bird-god wasn\u2019t very careful, and the pitcher leaked into four different rivers.
\nWhich, 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.
\nTwelve 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\u2019s 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?)
\nOf 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 \u201cthe Other\u201d: 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. \u201cOur 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,\u201d Swami Adhokshajanand, one of the current Sankara charyas, told TEHELKA at the Maha Kumbh.
\nThe 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<\/em>, to gird up Hinduism\u2019s trusses, and also installed a twin religious order: of saints to protect the faith by preaching the sh\u0101stra<\/em> (scriptures), and of naked sadhus to do so by shastra<\/em> (arms). For this, the boy-saint is said to have created a string of akhadas<\/em>, or regiments, and tasked them with inducting, training and organising the preachers and the fighters.
\nThe akhadas<\/em> were placed under the control of the four religious leaders, named Jagadguru (world guru) Sankaracharyas, who headed the four peethas<\/em>. Over time, the akhadas\u00a0<\/em>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\u2019s Big Tent, the Kumbh Mela thus traditionally showcased its grandest socio-religious assembly, fertile for religious discourses as well as Vedic preachings and debates.
\nBut 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 \u2014 the babas and the swamis \u2014 who have set up shop outside the order, earning millions in followers and billions in income. \u201cA rosary, a mat and a staff are the only possessions an ascetic ever needs,\u201d says Sankaracharya Adhokshajanand of the godmen. \u201cThe wealth of these babas should be confiscated.\u201d
\nAnd what wealth they have. Joining the Indian Air Force in 1957, Pilot Baba claims he flew MIGs in two of India\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.
\n\u201cFighting G-force as a pilot helped me,\u201d Pilot Baba says when I get an exclusive audience because I knew someone who knew someone who is his disciple. \u201cThe transformation came at once, making me understand there is more to truth.\u201d 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\u2019t easy to grasp his \u201ctruth\u201d. Here is an excerpt: \u201cI 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.\u201d
\nHe 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. \u201cThey all disappear.\u201d Once that happens, \u201cyou can do in 10 seconds what you can\u2019t do in one year\u201d. Whatever. I am now sneaking glances at his bracelet. I am sure it has innumerable diamonds. What else would shine so? Why wouldn\u2019t they be real anyway? Then he says: \u201cWe are not teaching the truth. People who are teaching the Gita, the Bible, the Quran are not teaching the truth. They\u2019re talking about the truth.\u201d What?
\nAfter 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\u2019m driven to ask him why sadhus smoke up. \u201cAdi Sankaracharya, a great intellectual, told the sadhus to smoke (hashish) systematically to kill the sexual power,\u201d he says. \u201cI thank Sankaracharya that he gave the sadhus the dope.\u201d Perhaps Pilot Baba knows what he is talking about.
\nEvidently, 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, \u201cnot of the body, but of the mind\u201d. Because the sadhus are not bothered by the body. That is why he has often taken samadhis \u2014 or immersion \u2014 in water, underground, and in \u201cairtight\u201d containers, for up to five days each.
\nThe 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. \u201cIt is only spiritual practices that bring results,\u201d she says, speaking through an interpreter from Varanasi who is as foxed by her obsession as I am. \u201cPraying to Shiva rids me of bad feelings and creates an aura of exceptional sensations.\u201d
\nCertainly, 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.
\n\u201cThis is my third Kumbh and I am here to see if I can find my guru\u2019s guru\u2019s guru\u2019s guru,\u201d Gupta tells me. That final guru is none other than Babaji Maharaj (who Gupta says has been \u201cin body for 2,000 years and lives in the Himalayas\u201d) referred to in the bestselling book The Autobiography of a Yogi<\/em> 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\u2019s main goal now is to run into Babaji at a Kumbh, because he knows that Babaji visits every Kumbh. \u201cIt is not easy to spot him though because he is often in disguise, mostly as a young sadhu.\u201d Presently, his smile withers. \u201cHowever, I know I won\u2019t see him. Because I am not ready for him yet.\u201d
\nIs everyone\u00a0at the Kumbh then beyond the pale of my comprehension? Not really. For 25-year-old Vandith, who won\u2019t give a second name because \u201cit is not important at the Kumbh\u201d, 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. \u201cIt is not about being religious or Hindu,\u201d he explains. \u201cIt is about feeling good about myself.\u201d
\nFor 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<\/em>, 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. \u201cWe had to come to the Kumbh for the experience,\u201d 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?
\n\u201cThe experience\u201d 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, \u201cwe had read an article in November and I was, like, oh god, Kumbh is next year, let\u2019s go\u201d. It became a kind of \u201ccool factor.\u201d
\nPallavi 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\u2019t decide if she should jump into the water. \u201cWe walked around for 45 minutes, not sure if we should.\u201d Then they did.
\n\u201cIt felt good,\u201d she says. \u201cIn my head I said that I am here to take a dip to feel recharged. To wash away the sins of my ancestors.\u201d Really? Did she really believe that? \u201cI did it for my mom, who believes in it. Maybe part of me believes in it, too.\u201d Also, she and others have come in because \u201cwe have a friend who is a white American and is a DJ and is a baba. We are all so excited to meet him.\u201d
\najit@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is no small irony that two of the most astounding moments of my life are embedded in the most iconic religious experience at Kumbh<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":96779,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[8626,4306,8870,8871,5602,8872,7692,6486,491,8873,8874,6204,8875,1669,7564],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96680"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}