His ebony skin glistens in the sun as he rubs the white ‘Vibhuti’ into his palm – before carefully making a mark on his wrinkled forehead. He flashes me a toothless grin, doing his best to look candid as I take his picture. Like him, many other saffron clad ‘babas’ dot the banks of the Godavari, bathing, singing or just basking in the warm Nashik sun before the festive frenzy sets in.
One of the most hallowed festivals in India, the Kumbh Mela is a large religious congregation and – according to Harvard – the Maha Kumbh in Allahabad is better organised than even the FIFA World Cup!
I had come to the Mela with a friend and fellow Kumbh enthusiast, Megan. A hardened Kumbh goer, Megan promised to not leave my side – and I believed her; she was currently braving it out in ‘big, bad Delhi’. We had, in fact, decided on ‘meeting spots’ that we were going to haunt at the Mela before we even reached. However, we needn’t have worried.
Once at the Kumbh, we found no need to live out a Bollywood stereotype. We weaved through crowds effortlessly, soaked our feet in the sparkling, yet murky water and admired the blazing orange and ochre-clad sartorialists.
Yet, what’s remarkable is – the Kumbh is so much more than being simply the largest religious congregation in the world. It is today also being touted as a laboratory for tech companies and innovators that are thronging the fete.
Case in point? The Kumbathon – an annual hackathon started by techies and a team from MIT last year. This aims at building technology solutions to not only address public safety, health and sanitation challenges but also make Nashik a smart city in the years to come.
Several solutions have emerged as a result of these hackathons – such as, the ‘Crowd Management’ app to combat overcrowding and stampedes which identifies and displays high density areas to help with crowd dispersion.
Clearly, the Kumbh is on its way to great things. And soon.
(Sanjana Chowhan is a recovering multimedia journalist, currently dabbling in the digital media space. A graduate from Columbia Journalism School, she currently lives, works and inhales coffee in Mumbai.)
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