Indian texts promote several ethical, commendable actions for attaining the spiritual merit called punyam. These are also acts of expiation for inner purification because any positive entity neutralizes a negative entity and vice versa. A person does an unethical action and incurs a negative marking called papam, sin. He does some commendable action to neutralize the sinful or unethical act done by him. It can be an act of charity, an act of service, or study of scriptures accompanied by austerity such as abstinence, fasting and so on. Thus, it is an action expected to purge the mind of unethical tendencies.

As there is no equivalent word in English for punyam, we will use the same word here. There are several exhortations in scriptures about not only ethical actions but actions for purification of mind. One such is the visit to holy shrines or taking dips in holy rivers on auspicious occasions. The idea is to recall the historicity of the place, relive the memories of Vyasa or Rama or Krishna or Shankara and dwell on their teachings. Diana Eck, a Harvard professor, gave an impressive account of several holy places in India in her highly readable book ‘India – A Sacred Geography’. Every corner of India is associated with our puranic deities.

I visited the kumbh mela a few days ago and managed to take a dip at the confluence of three rivers – Ganga and Yamuna, which are seen and the unseen, subterranean stream of Saraswati, at Prayagraj. It was an incredibly pleasant experience. I am not sure whether I went there as a matter of duty prescribed in the texts or whether I had any desire. Certainly, I had no desire for punyam, because, as a student of Vedanta, I have to avoid both punyam and papam, because both are binding in nature. They both keep us in the cycle of birth and death, and do not help in releasing from the cycle. However, I offered prayers to my ancestors and felt happy. I am not sure whether any good has befallen because I used some official privileges in getting to the place and performing the rites. For a lay pilgrim this travel may be excruciating because of the long traffic jams which imprison and immobilize him at a spot. Despite this, people walked miles and miles, took a dip at some point and met the mysterious sadhus. It was a happy sight to see joy writ on the faces of millions of people in spite of getting rocked in the current of the flow.

The tele-gurus propagated several myths. They said that a holy dip in sangam would ensure the punyam of performing a thousand horse-sacrifices. Horse-sacrifice is a very ancient ritual performed by emperors. We read how Rama or Yudhishtira performed it. That was the greatest sacrifice ever. Many people could have been lured by such promises, contributing to the hugeness of the event. The tele-gurus ought to clarify that such exhortations in scriptures are not to be taken literally, but to be taken as endorsements to glorify and recommend a particular action. Getting rid of sins was not meant to be a business but meant to be an act of expiation leading to inner purification.

Some other visitors were probably attracted by the grandeur and magnitude of the event, by the surreal atmosphere with artificial intelligence tools said to be monitoring the whole event. By their visit to the place political leaders, members of judiciary, senior bureaucrats of different services, and prominent religious heads, they sent different signals to their constituencies.

The only disappointment was our inability to see the naga sadhus, because of the constraint of the volume of crowd and time. We had to contend with whatever was available on social media. Despite some adverse incidents, the sea of humanity managed itself. A police officer quipped, ‘it is not only the police who are doing the crowd control, but the God himself, present in the beatific faces of the tireless, innocent, forgiving pilgrims, who is controlling the event’. I couldn’t agree more.

(The writer is a former

DGP, Andhra Pradesh)