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Kumbh Mela is on at Sangam once again after a dozen years.
Much curiosity is evinced by enlightened foreigners at this epochal event. No doubt it is one of the wonders of the world merging the modern and ancient as everything in that amorphous thing called Hinduism is. The very spectacle of lakhs of people converging peacefully and congregating for more than a month in a tiny area on the banks of a river in freezing cold is daunting to aliens. Most of them tour the event out of curiosity and the rest out of voyeurism.
But this time I am told that Harvard research scholars are here to write their theses on the logistics and organization of the mela. They were here in India a decade ago at Bombay to study and write up theses on the famed Dabbawalas of the megalopolis...forgetting Prince Charles. But these must be social scientists; not biologists for whom bees and ants are greater organizers than men and women...but they have slaves and queens and drones unlike the modern man...like the wonder-builders of the pyramids.
Kumbh is one place you won't see me visiting in a million years.
It all has to do with my childhood experience of tourism.
Man and boy I am weak and meek. I recall the first ever tourism event of our family in my childhood. We were then living in a godforsaken village (Kurichedu) in interior AP that was connected to the nearest town (Guntur) by a single-track rail road that had only one passenger train passing though it. Our family then had my Father, mother, myself and three kid sisters. I was 5 then. Our plan was to travel to Guntur by train, stay there for a day, and proceed to the temple town Tirupati.
A couple of hours after our train left Kurichedu it stopped at a junction station called Narasaraopet where Father got down to fetch idlis and water from the railway restaurant. And I wanted to accompany him so that he was not lost. But he forbade me asking me to take care of his family; and he WAS lost.
He didn't reappear with the promised tiffin and the train left the station. The bogies were not vestibuled then (forget it!). And our tickets were in his pocket. So my worry was two-fold...for my lost Father, and for the rest of us who I was sure would be caught by the ticket collector and jailed. My mom was not much troubled and tried to console me saying that he was like that and enjoyed such pranks and would join us at the next station.
But of course it didn't prevent me from crying buckets.
And before the next station arrived, the train stopped by the wayside and Father was with us in a couple of minutes. The great joy of finding him alive and good was spoiled by his remark that the water in the boiler of the steam engine got exhausted and the driver couldn't start it with his will power alone.
After half an hour during which Father was making needless trips to and fro the engine I found that there was a long line of passengers (including Father) who were transporting leaky buckets of water as if in an assembly line from a wayside canal to the engine.
The train started chugging after a couple of hours during which coal was frugally reloaded to see that the furnace didn't cool down on one hand and coal stock didn't get depleted on the other...all these technicalities I garnered from Father's tall tales to mom.
It was past midnight by the time we reached Guntur. And our hosts who were to receive us at the station were apparently told that the train would arrive by the next morning. So they went home. And we were stranded on the Guntur platform without anything to eat.
And as our Autocrat said:
"Today's dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's revolution"
I don't recall any hitch during our journey from Guntur to Tirupati except that it was terribly hot...all our visits had to be during the summer holidays...and Guntur is the hottest district in AP.
We had to put up in a choultry at Tirupati which didn't have running water but had plenty of mosquitoes to make up for it. And we were all loaded in a horse-drawn buggy on our way to the temple at Tiruchanur. Midway, the horse went on a non-co-operation movement and on being egged on by his driver with whiplashes the horse bolted, leaving the buggy behind, and us flat on the road.
And we took another buggy by and by and reached the temple precincts rather shopworn. And Father was rather kind to me and bought me a banana. As soon as I peeled it and was about to upload it, a resident monkey jumped on me and scratched my hand and ran away with my banana...
Do you think with such memorable virgin experiences of tourism I would go to any mela, Kumbh or Ardhkumbh?
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Much curiosity is evinced by enlightened foreigners at this epochal event. No doubt it is one of the wonders of the world merging the modern and ancient as everything in that amorphous thing called Hinduism is. The very spectacle of lakhs of people converging peacefully and congregating for more than a month in a tiny area on the banks of a river in freezing cold is daunting to aliens. Most of them tour the event out of curiosity and the rest out of voyeurism.
But this time I am told that Harvard research scholars are here to write their theses on the logistics and organization of the mela. They were here in India a decade ago at Bombay to study and write up theses on the famed Dabbawalas of the megalopolis...forgetting Prince Charles. But these must be social scientists; not biologists for whom bees and ants are greater organizers than men and women...but they have slaves and queens and drones unlike the modern man...like the wonder-builders of the pyramids.
Kumbh is one place you won't see me visiting in a million years.
It all has to do with my childhood experience of tourism.
Man and boy I am weak and meek. I recall the first ever tourism event of our family in my childhood. We were then living in a godforsaken village (Kurichedu) in interior AP that was connected to the nearest town (Guntur) by a single-track rail road that had only one passenger train passing though it. Our family then had my Father, mother, myself and three kid sisters. I was 5 then. Our plan was to travel to Guntur by train, stay there for a day, and proceed to the temple town Tirupati.
A couple of hours after our train left Kurichedu it stopped at a junction station called Narasaraopet where Father got down to fetch idlis and water from the railway restaurant. And I wanted to accompany him so that he was not lost. But he forbade me asking me to take care of his family; and he WAS lost.
He didn't reappear with the promised tiffin and the train left the station. The bogies were not vestibuled then (forget it!). And our tickets were in his pocket. So my worry was two-fold...for my lost Father, and for the rest of us who I was sure would be caught by the ticket collector and jailed. My mom was not much troubled and tried to console me saying that he was like that and enjoyed such pranks and would join us at the next station.
But of course it didn't prevent me from crying buckets.
And before the next station arrived, the train stopped by the wayside and Father was with us in a couple of minutes. The great joy of finding him alive and good was spoiled by his remark that the water in the boiler of the steam engine got exhausted and the driver couldn't start it with his will power alone.
After half an hour during which Father was making needless trips to and fro the engine I found that there was a long line of passengers (including Father) who were transporting leaky buckets of water as if in an assembly line from a wayside canal to the engine.
The train started chugging after a couple of hours during which coal was frugally reloaded to see that the furnace didn't cool down on one hand and coal stock didn't get depleted on the other...all these technicalities I garnered from Father's tall tales to mom.
It was past midnight by the time we reached Guntur. And our hosts who were to receive us at the station were apparently told that the train would arrive by the next morning. So they went home. And we were stranded on the Guntur platform without anything to eat.
And as our Autocrat said:
"Today's dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's revolution"
I don't recall any hitch during our journey from Guntur to Tirupati except that it was terribly hot...all our visits had to be during the summer holidays...and Guntur is the hottest district in AP.
We had to put up in a choultry at Tirupati which didn't have running water but had plenty of mosquitoes to make up for it. And we were all loaded in a horse-drawn buggy on our way to the temple at Tiruchanur. Midway, the horse went on a non-co-operation movement and on being egged on by his driver with whiplashes the horse bolted, leaving the buggy behind, and us flat on the road.
And we took another buggy by and by and reached the temple precincts rather shopworn. And Father was rather kind to me and bought me a banana. As soon as I peeled it and was about to upload it, a resident monkey jumped on me and scratched my hand and ran away with my banana...
Do you think with such memorable virgin experiences of tourism I would go to any mela, Kumbh or Ardhkumbh?
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