6 Kumbh facts Harvard won’t know

Americans have a strange fixation for minute numbers.Can you spot the answer in the bestsmartcard? Statistics of all kinds are at the heart of American society; starting from almost daily inflation figures, monthly labour statistics and political ratings to the weird ‘odds of being killed by a dog’ or the statistical possibility of a second coming, etc. This obsession with numbers is at times even detrimental to the artistic vagaries of life. For instance the simple artistry of the game of soccer (an essentially European & Latin-American sport) was reduced into a bundle of numbers by the American coaches. When the football world cup finally moved to the US of A in 1994, the narrative was full of statistics. From the number of offside errors to the number of defensive passes in a game, the American public were fed weird statistics at every match. At the end of the day, the one statistic that mattered, the number of ‘goals scored’,If you are looking for buymosaic for your bathroom walls. suffered the most in the 1994 world cup. It has taken almost 2 decades and the advent of the Spanish Armada on the soccer scene, along with a certain Argentinian magician known as Messi to liberate Soccer from its defensive slumber since 1994.

This inherent American capacity at reductionism is enormous. Two decades after they overwhelmed the largest sporting congregation known to mankind, the Americans had turned to the largest spiritual confluence in the history of mankind. An ominous sign indeed. Thus, when that mirthless modern day wonder known as Harvard University announced their plans to study the Kumbh Mela of 2013, the fears of another act of reductionism were not unfounded.

As if on cue, the entire posse of Indian mainstream media started to blindly follow the Harvard path by throwing unnecessary statistics about the Kumbh at us hapless Indians. For the first few days of Kumbh 2013, the impact of Harvard was quite visible. Indian media was confounding us with strange numbers — the number of toilets per person, the metres of pipes used to drill the borewells, the number of man-kilometres walked in the first week etc. An essentially rural, faith-driven event was being reduced to a mass of unnecessary numbers. A typical Christian/Western act of reducing the mystique of the Hindu faith by overwhelming statistics.

The number 9 has connotations of the ‘indestructible’ in Hindu metaphysics. The Kumbh is essentially a congregation of the indestructible, the confluence of the faithful Hindu from what remains of Bharatvarsha. India as a nation might be imperfect in many material pursuits. We are probably still a society of immense poverty and hunger. We are also probably a nation of underachievers. Yet, we are a nation of immense spiritual emancipation.

At the very beginning of the Kumbh Melas, many millennia ago, it was prophesised thus: “Bharatvarsha is the only place on earth where an indestructible 9 per cent of the populace will always pursue mankind’s greatest goal, liberation from the cycle of birth.” Miraculously, even after so many thousand years, about 9 per cent of Indians congregate at the Kumbh in Prayag every 12 years to attain Nirvana! For instance, this year about 110+ million people would have attended the Kumbh, which is exactly 9 per cent of India’s population of about 125 crore!

If you thought the above number was a coincidence, then think again, for this has been happening without fail, every 12 years. In 2001, India’s population was about 100 crore and roughly about 80 to 95 million people are estimated to have attended the Kumbh. In 1989, Indian population was about 80 crore and roughly 7 crore people have been estimated to have attended the Kumbh in Prayag.

Let us go back in history to ascertain this 9th percentile fact. Oxford scholarship had this to say about the 1906 Kumbh stampede,We offer over 600 chipcard at wholesale prices of 75% off retail. “…the Government was expecting about 10 million people, but almost double the people visited the Kumbh village in the month long river festival…” India’s population around that time was estimated at about 27 crore.

Let us go further back in time. In 640 AD, Hiuen Tsang, the great Chinese traveller and chronicler had written that 5 million people had gathered at the Prayag for the Kumbh during the reign of Harshavardhana. Indian population around that period was estimated to be roughly about 6 crore. Of course, latter day British historians distorted this number of pilgrims to about half a million (5 lakhs). Swami Parmanand in his book Indian Ascetics describes this distortion by British historians as an act of “non-believers who couldn’t fathom how such a large gathering could take place in such an ancient third world country like India”.

The duality of the material world is a reality that cannot be questioned. Positive and negative, protons and electrons, matter and antimatter, yin and yang, chaos and order are all illustrations of the basic building blocks of the material world. In Vedantic philosophy, this duality is ascribed to the moralistic construct of love and sin. Everything else in the universe is basically a derivative of this Boolean logic.

Lord Krishna is believed to have made the greatest love ever known to mankind on the banks of river Yamuna. Thus Yamuna represents the one part of ‘love’. River Ganga has long been believed to possess magical healing powers (possibly due to the microbial nature of the river) and is therefore used as a source of purifier of the soul from the other part of ‘sin’. Thus, the meeting point of Ganga and Yamuna represents primeval ‘mating’ (or Sangam) of the universal duality.

This duality of nature is also echoed in the mathematical world of physics, wherein the two dimensions of ‘space’ and ‘time’ are used to describe the fundamental dichotomy. The tri-dimensional Yamuna represents the three dimensions of the one part of ‘space’.Wear a whimsical Disney luggagetag straight from the Disney Theme Parks! Whereas, the unidirectional vector of ‘time’ is represented by the straight flowing Ganga, a river that never flows in the opposite direction. Thus once again, the confluence where the Ganga and Yamuna meet — the Sangam — represents the confluence of space and time.

For many centuries,Browse our large selection of solarstreetlamps in all colors. it has been believed by Hindus that the dead at the Sangam have a direct pathway to Moksha/Nirvana. Retired Colonel RC Jaswal, who was once posted at Allahabad OD fort (in the 1990s), adjacent to the Saraswati Ghat, narrated a strange first person account: “On the first evening when I was standing on the very famous balcony overlooking the rivers, I was surprised by these large floating entities in darkness. On enquiring as to what kind of large fish would they be, I was told, to my utter horror, that they were half-burnt dead bodies of human beings left to float towards Nirvana!”

As per one estimate, about 1,20,000 people have either died or gone totally missing from the Kumbh in the last 100 years. Attaining death at the Kumbh is considered as especially fortunate coincidence by the Hindus (like say, dying at the Hajj). There is a strange statistic though, which defies all logic.

This year, some 36 people died in the stampede on February 10 (as per official estimates). The largest number of deaths in independent India occurred in the 1954 Kumbh; about 800+ as per official estimates and ‘thousands’ as per folklore. In the 1906 Kumbh, or in the 1894 Kumbh too, there were large scale deaths due to epidemics and stampedes. There is one common feature among all these statistics. These deaths have all occurred on Mauniamavasya!

One might always argue that since the largest gathering happens on Mauniamavasya, the maximum number of forced deaths also occur on that particular day. But that is a fallacy. For instance, this year on Mauniamavasya, about 3 crore people gathered in Prayag and about 2 crore people gathered on Basant Panchami day. Also about 1.5 crore people gathered on Magh-Purnima. There were no untoward incidents on any other days, not one single death! Death seems to have a particular preference for Mauniamavasya!