Festival life

Holy cities, I’ve seen a few. It’s a low year for the Magh Mela festival in Allahabad. Here, where the Ganga meets the Yamuna and the invisible, underground Saraswati rivers, the enormous Kumbh Mela festival is held every twelve years and tens of millions of people descend on Allahabad to bathe in the holy confluence under the full moon. The Magh Mela is the humdrum annual festival. It lasts for a month and my guide told me that around 400,000 pilgrims are currently in town. The dusty tent city between the rivers stretches for kilometres . I picked up a discarded copy of the Bulletin a few days ago and read about the upcoming World Youth Day in Sydney; the dimensions of the Sydney event do pale in comparison. Still, a Sydney full of pilgrims seeking not sporting jubilation but spiritual fulfilment is an exciting prospect.