Lyme resident Debbie Mandel traveled to India in February 2013 for the Kumbha Mela Spiritual Pilgrimage. She will present a slide show and some short videos at the Library's regular book club meeting on Thursday, June 20 at 7 P.M. The public is welcome to attend. Please call the library at 860-434-2272 or email programreg@lymepl.org to register. Below is her description:
After visiting the Kumbha Mela in 1895, Mark Twain wrote: “It is wonderful. The power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining. It is done in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know which it is. No matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination, marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites.” In February of this year, I had the privilege of going on a spiritual pilgrimage with Svaroopa Vidya Ashram, the Yoga group to which I belong. Led by Swami Nirmalananda Saraswati, who lived in India for many years studying Kashmir Shivism (a branch of Hinduism) and Siddha Yoga, we visited two of Hinduism’s holiest sites. The Village of Ganeshpur is the home for thousands of years of the lineage of Kashmir Shiviism. The Kumbha Mela, in Alhalabad, is the largest gathering of people in the world. Hindus come by the tens of millions to bathe in the Ganges River in order to purify themselves of their sins. An event that has taken place every twelve years, for the last 5,000 years, it is spectacular; aesthetically, culturally and spiritually. The major event of the festival is the ritual bathing at the banks of the river Ganges, at the Sangam (the confluence of Ganges, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati Rivers) in Allahabad. Other activities include religious discussions, devotional singing, mass feeding of holy men and women and the poor, and religious assemblies where doctrines are debated and standardized. The Kumbha Mela is one the most sacred of all the pilgrimages in the world and by far the largest. Tens of thousands of holy men and women (Sadus) attend. But also millions of men and women, families, children, also come. Walking for miles and miles, the women dressed in saris, everyone, children included, carrying their possessions on their heads in suitcases, baskets, wrapped in cloth, all for their religious devotion. Please join our book group on June 20th at 7:00 pm as I share my journey to Ganeshpuri and The Kumbha Mela with a slide show and some short videos. Refreshments will be served. A suggested reading for the evening, in order to help you get a sense of the extreme dedication the Sadus have for their faith is Nine Lives; in Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple. – Debbie Mandel
