Ardh Kumbh Mela
Very, very slowly, I'm getting to things that I did months ago. There's this festival called the Kumbh Mela, which happens four times every twelve years, rotating among four locations. This year, the Ardh (half) Kumbh Mela was held in Allahabad, in eastern UP, at the confluence of the Ganga (Ganges), Yamuna and [mythical] Saraswati rivers, so Peter and Daniel and I went to check it out. Allahabad turns out to be a really pleasant town, much like Lucknow would be if the British hadn't destroyed it in retribution for the Mutiny of 1857. Aside from nice buildings all over, it also has really great rickshaws, decorated more elaborately than I've seen anywhere else. The action happens at the riverbank, but to get there, you ride a cycle rickshaw a few miles through the old city, till you have to get out at a road block. Then you walk for a few miles through the rest of the city, passing thousands of people trying to give free food to the pilgrims - kachoris and other fried things, halwa, and all kinds of things, all of it fairly delicious. If you can politely fight them off and keep walking, you eventually come to the humongous floodplain of the Ganges, and you walk for miles and miles through the sand to the water's edge. It's hard to overstate how big a thing this festival is: on the day we were there, Makar Sankranti, two million people showed up to get the extra spiritual benefit of bathing (snan) in the rivers. Everywhere, there were families, old people, and more sadhus (ascetics) than you can imagine, plus me. It was pretty interesting, because there's not really any way to be as modest as people are accustomed to being when you're surrounded by two million other people, so you saw a lot more skin, belonging to all sorts of people, than you normally do. A little away from the water, there are vast tent cities where people stay for the month, attend concerts of devotional music, get sick and well, listen to lectures, eat and answer the call of commerce.
