India- The Maha Kumbh festival- the world's largest demonstration of faith

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The world's largest religious festival, and arguably the most fascinating is underway right now in the city of Prayag (also known as Allahabad) in the north India state of Uttar Pradesh.

For 55 days, Hindu worshippers from all over the world (including many western converts) will converge on the area for a ritual cleansing in the Ganges at the point where Ganges, the Yamuna and the (mythical?) Saraswati converge.

How many worshippers will attend? Some reports state 100 million will attend this year. Other forecasts based on the area suggest tht a more realistic number is around 10,000,000 at any one time. This year is a special year, according to Hindu thought. The planetary juxtasposition covering this years event occurs only every 147 years.

The festival can also be described as the world's greatest manifestation of faith. The faithful often purposely endure hardship in travel, often arriving on foot, and sleeping on the ground in cold weather in the belief that enduring hardship will enhance their ritual bath and their souls will cleansed and they could be liberated from the cycle of birth and death.

An Indian web-site tells you more: http://www.kumbhamela.net/

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Firmly stuck in my young memory are the very large JW Assemblies of 1953 and 1955 (I think I remember the dates correctly- correct me if I'm wrong) and the associated temporary accommodation, of which Watchtower PR flacks boasted as being an amazing demonstration of faith. I worked in the PR department for a while. In Australian the urbane ex-Canadian Don Maclean was often in charge. I wonder when he sent out news releases full of statistics if he'd ever heard of the Maha Kumbh festival, and the statisitics associated with it.

Here are some statistics that beat a JW Asssembly statistics by a million miles:

Quote:

'The Kumbh City - a 51-kilometer makeshift venue - is a microcosm of a real city. It hosts hundreds of tents, 125 ration shops and 12 warehouses to cater to the visitors' daily needs for grains, groceries, vegetables and fruits. According to state officials, 22 doctors and 120 ambulances are in attendance round-the-clock. Near the riverbed, 156 km of new metallic plate roads have been laid and 571 km of water pipelines constructed to cater for the pilgrims' needs. Over 800 km of electric wires provide electricity to the venue through 48 power sub-stations.

Over 30,000 policemen will be guarding the venues supervised by 30 new police stations and 70 new companies of paramilitary forces. "The heavy and visible deployment of police is a huge deterrent for trouble makers," explains sub-inspector Ram Asray. "It also ensures that rivalries of the assorted religious groups over the sequence of bathing does not trigger violence or a stampede." '

And, if you're not humble enough to rought it with the mob, for just $200 a night, you can rent a luxury tent, with your own bathroom (you may need it after bathing in the highly polluted river water), your own dressing room. I presume that Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones, who are said to be among the visitors who will choose luzury over a harsh treatment of the body/

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This year, Harvard university is sending a team of students to study the festival. They are intending (it is said) to examine how the festival is organised. Different faculties and departments will attempt to map the festival including, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), School of Design, Harvard Business School, School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Global Health Institute.

Since the JWs were once claiming that Assembly organisation was evidence of Yahweh's superior spirit operating on the witnesses, can we now conclude from this festival, which has been operating at least from the 8th C. CE and which gives evidence of even greater deeds than the JW organisation that the spirit of the Hindu gods is much greater and much superior to Yahweh's puny efforts.

At this festival (for example) accommodation of many types has to provide shelter and food for millions upon millions of visitors :

Quote:

"This city, laid out on a grid, is constructed and deconstructed within a matter of weeks ... Creating this huge encampment entails multiple aspects of contemporary urbanism, including city planning and management, engineering and spatial zoning, an electricity grid, water lines and sanitation systems, food and water distribution plans, hospitals and vaccination centres, police and fire stations, public gathering spaces, and stages for entertainments and plays, the university said. "This is probably the first time that Harvard is doing something like this, where we've pulled together...different disciplines in a way that all faculty and students are going to be together to look at a phenomenon," Associate Director of Harvard's South Asia Institute, Meena Hewett, said in a statement.

The Harvard team would seek answers to the "question of 'How on earth is an event of this size possible'," city-based writer Logan Plaster, who would be part of the team visiting the Kumbh Mela, said. "To fully grapple with this question, the scale of the Kumbh needs to be put in perspective". The Graduate School of Design team would study the Kumbh Mela as a case study for the "pop-up mega-city" and would map flows of people and infrastructure. The FAS team would look at various religious and cultural aspects of the event, including the kinds of religious groups present at the festival, devotional practices, tourism and environmental concerns, while the health team would study water quality, sanitation techniques, health clinic readiness and presence and networks of hospitals and public health facilities."