Posted on 01/27/2019 5:09:12 PM PST by marshmallow
Shivering and blue-lipped but smiling, Niraj Shukla emerged from the Ganges River this week, flanked by his parents and millions of other people, feeling renewed.
"The water is very cold, but once you have a bath – it's sort of a miracle, you know?" said Shukla, a 32-year-old engineer who lives in India's capital New Delhi.
The Shukla family were among the first of what's expected to be 150 million pilgrims all taking a dip in India's holy river through March 4 as part of the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu religious festival billed as the world's largest gathering of human beings at one event.
It happens every 12 years, its dates fixed according to the alignment of the stars and planets. This year is a half-Kumbh – six years since the last one – but it's nevertheless expected to be the biggest so far. The government officials and religious authorities who organize the event estimate that 15 million people showed up on Tuesday, the opening day.
For the 2019 event, some 200 miles of new roads were built to ferry pilgrims from all corners of India. They also come by train, or by boat down the Ganges, carrying their belongings in bundles balanced on their heads. Pilgrims sleep in a vast tent city at the river's edge, where temperatures slide toward freezing at night.
Rich and poor, tourists and ascetic monks, all squat side by side, chanting mantras.
They include naked dreadlocked holy men, Hindu priests draped in orange sarongs and garlands of marigolds, families with infants, foreign backpackers on spiritual journeys – and Shukla and his parents, who hail from the host city, Allahabad.
Shukla returns home whenever his hometown hosts the Kumbh. This is his third.
The bathing spot is at the confluence of three rivers: the.....
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
I about gagged just reading about this huge outdoor toilet without seeing the pictures. You have to be insane even getting close to that river.
“Ganges”- quite possibly from the samr root word as “gangrene”.
They can post bad stuff about Christianity as well. This mutual mud-slinging serves no one.
Ganges comes from Ancient Greek Γάγγης (Gángēs) from Sanskrit (गङ्गा ) (gáṅgā, literally “swift-goer”), from verbal root √gam (√gam, “to go”).
Remember that both are Indo-European languages.
I assume Herbalife is number two.
No one here is denying other people’s right to worship as they wish. Hell, let them drink it if it makes them feel more holy. Telling the truth about the filth in the river is not “mud-slinging”. Garbage slinging, maybe...
There’s a difference between “respect” and “tolerance”.
Yup I believe you can also see any number of bodies floating by Animal and human
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