Ganga & Me

River Ganges (Ganga) fascinated me for the sheer position it enjoys in the pantheon of rivers in India. Apart from that, a Telugu saying "Ganga snanam, Tunga paanam", meaning a dip in river Ganga and a sip of river Tunga are considered as the ultimate standards. In my early childhood I had quite a lot of Tunga Paanam anyway and did not know the difference.

I did not get to see Ganga till 1980, when I went to Delhi to appear in an interview for a Netherlands Fellowship Programme. After that, I went visiting Dehradun to Jaya's place (sis in law) for the first time. They & Rakesh, my friend from BITS Pilani, who lived in Dehradun, naturally took me around - which meant going to Hardwar and Rishikesh and of course Mussoorie. At Hardwar, I saw Ganga for the first time. The experience was nice but not significant. I became aware of the refreshing whiteness of Ganga and nothing more really. I was, however, to visit Ganga several times in multiple cities and only then could I experience its power, its mystic, and its magic. It has invoked deep seated emotions in me.

I visited it twice with my children - the first time it was to laugh with them and play with them on its banks and give them a dunking and also show them the huge fishes swimming swiftly in its current. We also bought some fish food to throw to them, as if they were not well fed enough already. The second time was a bit scary - I hadn't realized the danger of sitting on the concrete platform created for the evening Aarti as a single chaperon for four highly playful kids of descending ages (my two nieces and my two daughters). It was brought home to me when Shivani squirted water with her palms on all of us and I mistook a plastic scrap to be a water organism and jerked suddenly, almost toppling Preeti into the water. My stars were good - I only managed to knock off Preeti's new black and white framed spectacles and we also involuntarily stooped down to save them. It was impossible - I still did not realise the danger of slipping and falling. A couple of kids (urchins really - who keep hanging about) dove in and searched without success. One of them said to me that the current of Ganga is so strong that the glasses would have been swept away a great distance already (he said miles). It was then that the risk I was taking in putting the kids to such danger, made me immediately get the children to move away from the platform. I was petrified with the thought of what could have happened. It didn't help with Preeti's wild imagination that her glasses would reach the Bay of Bengal and then travel to Indian Ocean and reach the South African shores where Alan Donald (her favourite cricketer) would pick them up, as it only compounded my dread. It was this incident that made me look at Ganga properly - how many times we visit places and only just about visit them without actually seeing them properly? I noticed the quiet but superfast current of the river and admired its sheer power without any sound or show about it. It is so deceptive! The mark of the truly powerful!

The true spirit and power of Ganga is captured in Bapu's film Seeta Kalyanam (a film that is prescribed syllabus in many US universities). The artiste director Bapu created a poem in celluloid on the birth of Ganga. It seems Bapu created many sketches of Ganga in various stages, almost like an animation album, as words cannot accurately express the right emotions, characterisation and nuances, as well as a picture can. He then filmed the actual sequence. He has been able to capture the true spirit of Ganga in the splendour of her being, her dynamiting dynamism, her anger and her arrogance, her power and more. This picturisation remained embedded on my heart eternally. I also bought an imprint of his painting where Ganga deigns to come down to earth first dancing on Shiva's head and one small part of her is allowed to escape from his knotted labyrinth of hair to make her mark on the land of mortals.

My next encounter with Ganga was the most beautiful and insightful. This was when I was doing a study on the Restructuring of Bharat Yantra Nigam (if there is a Limca Book of records for the number of studies, probably this would win), I went to Allahabad with my colleague Sanal. It was November, cool days had started. We had a very short time of one and a half days to cover the Head Office and the two factories in Allahabad and Naini. The liaison person, DGM Corp Plg, wanted to know if we wanted to visit places, particularly the Sangam (confluence of Ganga and Yamuna - a very holy and a must see place for Hindus). I was totally averse to it, having seen ad nauseum, the TV images of the Maha Kumbh, which concluded just a week before we visited the place. The entire pseudo religious commercialisation had put me off completely, and no amount of incentive for crediting my virtue account with God, did not entice me to pay a visit. Sanal was anyway a work focussed man, so we declined. We were returning from Naini at about 5.20 pm and the November sun was just about setting. When we reached the Sangam - the DGM almost pleaded with me that since the place now had no crowd, we should step out for a dekko for just five minutes. I felt bad that we were giving such a hard time to the person whose only interest was in making us witness something which every visitor to Allahabad demanded to see as a matter of right. I thought that if we just take a walk and come back to the vehicle, it would take no more than 5-10 minutes and we thus proceeded.

I was totally unprepared for what followed. I don't even know whether I can describe it in terms that would do full justice to it. I found the river bank devoid of any humna being, sans one panda who was doing some ritual on the sand. We had an unbounded view of the magnificent painting in the sky - it was, coincidentally, a full moon day. The sun was setting and the moon was rising. On one end I could see a huge ball of orange and on the other, a huge ball of silver. It looked so beautiful and too good to be real. I had never seen such huge orbs of the sun and the moon at what seemed like very close quarters. I felt that if I ran ahead, I could hold each ball in each of my outstretched hands. My eyes could not stop drinking and getting overwhelmed by this magnificent celestial painting. It was then that I heard the Ganga - she was rushing forward as if in a tearing hurry - you could feel her power surging forward. She was white and rippling in every muscle and yet looked sinewy and graceful. I turned to look at Yamuna - slow, limpid, languid and lazily, heavily meandering, as if she knew that her sister would come rushing to meet her even if she didn't move an inch. She was lost in her deep brooding thoughts. What a contrast - the two sisters - born in the same terrain , coursing through the northern plains on parallel but paths of different stature and character. Yamuna - the elder one - deep, dark - (deep green), slowly moving - her mass providing her the momentum required to move forward, heavy and brooding. Ganga - white, rushing on treacherous slopes, tearing down everything that stood in her way, never slackening her speed, but not very deep, every movement of hers characterised by dynamism. Ganga then hits the 90 degree corner and her sheer force pushes away the older, heavier Yamuna a good distance. The arc where Ganga pushes away Yamuna is almost a half circle. At this point, Yamuna loses her identity and existence to Ganga's complete domination and she ceases to exist. I wonder what Ganga did to the underground river Saraswati, which also was said to join here - we do know that Saraswati ran dry. Ganga strides majestically forward.

My next views of Ganga were not so good - inasmuch because of the thronging crowds and dirt as also because now I cannot accept anything less than my earlier vision of this great lady. These were at Benares and Patna, both for UNICEF work related to water and sanitation and these places were anything but that. The overwhelming ritualistic presence at Benares put me off and I felt that Ganga became heavy and dirty here. I tried conjuring up my mother's experience on the floating bridge in Benares, decades earlier when she came to write her Matric exams and the misty droplets she described as splattering her face when she crossed on this bridge. I tried hard, but could not get to feel the beauty of Ganga here. I also was not very enamoured of the aarti here. In Patna, I did see the expanse of Ganga because of the large Gandhi Setu - I may be biased but Ganga appeared to have bloated and slowed down in Patna. The Setu itself, though supposed to be a great construction, the lack of attention to details and lack of aesthetics somehow undermined its greatness.

Probably my last encounter with Ganga was way back in 2002. I was in BHEL, Hardwar for a training programme. I was taken by AGM Mehrotra for the customary evening Aarti in Hardwar. This time I went willingly as I now had a relationship with Ganga. As VIP guests, we were taken very close to the waterfront and could sit just where the Aarti was to be performed. As I sat down, I was overcome with a tremendous feeling that she was calling me into her arms. I was petrified - I felt that I was being pulled heart, soul and body into a vortex. A part of me was saying that I should heed the call and go and my eyes kept flashing the images of my daughters and I knew that I had to stay longer in this world for them. But the tug was getting fearfully stronger - I felt that if did not move away from there, something disastrous was going to happen. I shocked Mehrotra by telling him that I feel like jumping in and ending my life. He just took me away from there and gave me a lecture on getting back to senses, whether or not he believed me that I had intended to die. I know definitely that if I hadn't made the effort of blurting it out, I would have taken the plunge - I would have been probably saved given the crowd there - or I would have probably been swept away into the arms of Ganga and released from all cares and worries of this world - who knows?

This feeling of pull stayed with me for two days, ebbing slowly as the flood of Ganga does. I went to Dehradun the next day to visit Jaya and with my strong belief that I have to overcome this feeling and pull that was lingering in me and that it can only be done by outpouring , I confided to Jaya about what happened to me. She was not in her normal cheerful and warm demeanour - she probably had something on her mind, or she simply thought that I was being melodramatic - she didn't say anything. Every pore of my body and soul was crying out, please reassure me so that I can become normal again. I knew then, I had to summon my own internal reserves to help myself. I again remembered and kept remembering my children and reminding myself that they still need me and returned to Delhi. It was in Delhi, when I had to wait for a delayed flight to Hyderabad and with all people milling around me that I thought and thought about a lot of things and the strong pull of Ganga was left behind slowly. I now no longer laugh at people who die for seemingly unnecessary reasons - I no longer think of them as cowards who could not face life - the urge to end it all can be sometimes the highest philosophical thought and it is indeed difficult to resist the dizzy eddying of emotion that surges at such moments. I also know now that I would not want to see my mentor Ganga again because this time, I may become one with her. By the way - I did not have Ganga 'snanam' till date, having managed only to wet my feet and not wanting to impart my sins and impurities to her.