Karma meets cola in human mosaic

NASIK: A tiny shack near the old Godavari temple calls itself Vaishnav hotel. Inside, a middle-aged waiter wears shabbiness on his tattered sleeves and unshaven jawline. Have aloo bhaji with puri. It goes well, he blurts in clear English, spoken in a smooth, city accent. Chandrakant works in an export firm in Mumbai. He is a regular to the Kumbh Mela, and the only way he can afford his pilgrimage is by doing odd jobs in small eateries and shops.The hotels are so exorbitant that I cannot afford them, he says. Add to it the incentive of blessings gleaned from serving devotees. Chandrakant is one of the faces in the staggering human mosaic called Kumbh Mela, which provides a confluence of millions of lives and their diverse karma. In what resembles a sociologist's giant laboratory, saints rub shoulders with street-urchins, film-makers pan their cameras across body-piercers, junkies and freelance stewards like Chandra. It is the coming together of the most ridiculously diverse people.The media can pick holes and point out negative aspects, but it misses out the celebration, the faith. One can talk about accommodation problems, administrative lapses etc., but only India can pull off such a huge human road show, says Denise Johnson, an Afro-American film-maker, which is making a six-episode TV series on the Kumbh. Each episode will be hosted by a different woman celebrity, mainly from Mumbai. Just as people have very different ways of making and appreciating a cup of tea, Kumbh represents a very different thing to each one who comes here, she says. Johnson has been coming to India since 1991. She is among those who consider the mela a visual feast. On the road from Nasik to Trimbakeshar, one spots the parade of the extraordinary and fierce-looking sadhus marching on with their tribe, embellished elephants and bullock carts adding a timeless grandeur to the procession, hornblaring jeeps jammed with families whizzing past with fluttering, saffron flags, and goats, cattle and other livestock completing the Great Indian Household on the move. Outside the Jyotirlinga temple at Trimbak, people in the long queues for darshan suddenly crane their necks. An uproarious melee enters the temple with the air of a minister on visit. The VVIP visitor is Gagangiri Maharaj, who arrives on the shoulders of his disciples. His legs are immobile. Lore has it that the Maharashtra-based sadhu stays halfimmersed in water for 18 hours a day. His devotees say the nibbling of fish at his leg has cost him his mobility. The stardom and following of the sadhus probably point at the permanent place of an ascetic in the Indian psyche, says Tyler Jason Neyhart, an American student doing research of the 'relationship of sadhus with contemporary Indian society'.