Kumbh Mela Diary : Mark Tully ( from the Outlook Magazine)

Fun and Fair

My partner Gillian Wright and I managed to persuade the BBC that they wanted a programme about the Kumbh Mela for their Radio 4 network. This took us to Allahabad for our third Maha Kumbh. I’ve described kumbh melas as spiritual trade fairs; when we arrived this time we found the fair in full swing. Maha­tmas, mahamandaleshwars, sadhus and sants had all set up their stalls and scattered their advertisements around the vast fair ground.  There was a deafening cacophony of music sacred and Bollywood, mixed with loudspeakers blaring the messages of the multitude of men and women who had come to put across their religious messages. The faithful were wandering from guru to guru, sampling discourses and listening to recitations of the great Hindu epics. The camps of the akharas, the historic monastic orders, were a big attraction.

---

The Kumbh Theology

I’ve always seen the Kumbh Mela as a magnificent demo­ns­t­ration of the variety of Hinduism and its acceptance that there are many different roads to God. Ma Purn Pragnya, a member of the Nagaur royal fam­ily who has robed herself in saffron, gave us an impressive discourse which seemed to confirm that plurality until she said that in the end all roads led to Vedanta. However, my faith in Hindu plu­ralism was reconfirmed by the Kabir panthis, who are so opposed to ritualism that they don’t believe in bathing in the Ganges. Their acharya told us it was better to bathe under a tap because the water was cleaner. My theology was stretched by a dis­cussion on the vexed subject of sin with the American Sadhvi Bhagvati, an enthusiastic par­ticipant in the Ganga Action Plan launched by her Guru, Swami Chidanandji. She pointed out that Christians, like me, regard ourselves as mis­erable sinners whereas Hindus believe that God resides within them, which I had to admit was a more positive assessment of the human race. Among those representing the Hindu tradition of asce­ti­cism we found Mahant Bholagiri Bapu holding his withered left arm in the air. He told us he had been performing that tapasya for 37 years. Ashok Singhal, former president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, represented political Hinduism, altho­ugh he denied he had anything to do with politics. He saw the Kumbh as evidence that India was a spiritual nation where religious harmony was perfect, but went on to say that religions which converted would be crushed.

---

The Great Bath

On the day of the great bath we found ourselves pressed up against a bam­boo barricade on the edge of the space reserved for the akharas bathing. In the two previous Kumbhs, the police had kept this space clear but this time they failed to do so. When I complained about the ineffectiveness of the UP police, my old friend Ramdutt Tripathi, the BBC Lucknow corres­pon­dent, said, “What do you exp­ect them to do, lathi­charge and cause a stampede?” He had a point. Eventually the police horses, unperturbed by the sea of people and the din, gently pushed the cro­wds back and cleared space for the akhara pro­ces­sions. Our loyalties were with the Juna Akhara. Their acharya, Advesha­nandji, sat on a silver how­dah mounted on a tractor trolley, not an ele­phant as tradition dem­an­ded. They have been ban­ned since one ran amuck and caused a stam­pede in the 1953 Kumbh. Earlier, we had recorded a long interview with the scho­larly head of the akh­ara and he had allowed us to witness the midnight ceremony at which more than a thousand initiates with shaved heads, and naked except for the thi­n­nest of thongs, took their vows of ren­un­ci­ation. They were among the army of Naga sadhus who marched in front of their acharya in the pro­ces­s­ion, leaping and whooping for joy. When they bathed, they splashed each other like children. 

---

The Heroes of the Kumbh

The heroes of the Kumbh are the millions of villagers who endure overcrowded trains and buses, then trudge for miles, carrying their possessions on their heads, to wait patiently for their turn to bathe. If it wasn’t for their patience, if they behaved like a normal crowd, the mela would be unma­na­geable. Those who mock their faith as superstition, and many do, insult what gives them the strength to live with hardships that we the elite could not bear. The administrators who spent months planning the mela deserve praise too. So do the police for showing unusual restraint and eventually producing order out of apparent chaos. Even the railways shouldn’t, I feel, be cast in the role of villains. The stampedes were tragic, but which other railway in the world could handle the number of passengers they had to cope with?

---

A hero of our own

Our producer Adam Fowler lugged his equipment around the mela, recording interviews, often in a language he did not understand and is, as I write this diary, editing 12 hours of material into a half-hour programme.

SMS Replied !

 There was a group of women gathered at a seminar on how to live in a loving relationship with your husband.

 The women were asked, ‘How many of you love your husbands?’
 

All the women raised their hands.

 Then they were asked, ‘When was the last time you told your husband you loved him?’

 Some women answered today, some yesterday, some didn’t remember.

 The women were then told to take their cell phones and send the following text: I love you, sweetheart. Then the women were told to exchange phones and read the responding text messages.

Here are some of the replies:

 1. Who is this??

2. Eh, mother of my children, are you sick?

3. I love you too.

 4. What now? Did you crash the car again?

 5. I don’t understand what you mean?

 6. What did you do now? I won’t forgive you this time.

 7. ?!?

 8. Don’t beat about the bush, just tell me how much you need?

 9. Am I dreaming?

 10. If you don’t tell me who this message is actually for, someone will die.

 11. I asked you not to drink anymore. I’ll leave if you are tired of me??

India is in good company !

So much for industrious Germans doing things on time

 BERLIN |From the print edition of the Economist

Screens still doing trial runs

SOON after the newly reunified Germany decided, in 1991, to move its capital back to Berlin from Bonn, the discussion about a suitable airport started. Berlin had three tiny ones: the famous Tempelhof (now closed) where American and British “raisin bombers” landed during the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49, Tegel, which is also in western Berlin, and Schönefeld in the eastern part of the city. Tegel (still in use) had mainly served the airlines of the three western Allies while East Germans had used Schönefeld.

Nearly everyone agreed in principle that the new capital needed a modern and sparkling airport. Planning started in 1996, construction in 2006. The plan was to open it in 2011.

The new airport originally got approval for handling 45m passengers a year, but is now meant for only 27m, which is roughly as many as the existing airports handle already. In fact, it can cope adequately with only 17m, says Dieter Faulenbach da Costa, an airport consultant who has appraised the project for an opposition party in Brandenburg’s state parliament. The airport originally had a budget of €2.4 billion ($3.2 billion) but is now likely to cost twice as much. Air Berlin, the carrier most affected, has sued for damages. And four people have died during construction.Alas, after several delays, the airport is still not operational. The buildings are ready in the state of Brandenburg that surrounds Berlin, near the old Schönefeld. But the train that arrives four times a day in the terminal does so only to ventilate the air and carries no people. The airport is due to open on October 27th. But most Berliners view that date like a second marriage, as the triumph of hope over experience.

The specific reason for the most recent delay, last June, had to do with the fire-safety systems, which are complex and still not ready. But Mr Faulenbach da Costa lists many other problems. There are too few check-ins and too few parking positions for aircraft. Some 100,000 residents will suffer from noise, whereas it could have been 30,000 if the location had been slightly different.

How did it get so bad? An engineering and an architecture firm have already been fired. Yet the people in overall charge are politicians. The airport’s two main shareholders are the states of Berlin and Brandenburg, followed by the federal government. So the mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, and the premier of Brandenburg, Matthias Platzeck, have the two top jobs on the supervisory board. Both belong to the centre-left Social Democratic Party. In particular, Mr Wowereit, a perennial and flamboyant cheerleader for Berlin as a world city, who made the airport one of his pet projects, has a lot to answer for.

Ralf Kunkel, the airport’s spokesman, says that the project’s troubles should be seen in the context of other public infrastructure works. In Stuttgart, a massive underground train station is behind schedule, as is a new concert hall in Hamburg. Germany’s largest container port was delayed several times before it partially opened in September. Even the country’s spy agency has had to postpone its move from the outskirts of Munich to Berlin because of building delays. In short, this sort of thing happens. Even to Germans.

A small world is now, it seems, even smaller......

IN 1967 Stanley Milgram, an American social scientist, conducted an experiment in which he sent dozens of packages to random people in Omaha, Nebraska. He asked them to pass them on to acquaintances who would, in turn, pass them on to get the packages closer to their intended final recipients. His famous result was that there were, on average, six degrees of separation between any two people. In 2011 Facebook analysed the 721m users of its social-networking site and found that an average of 4.7 hops could link any two of them via mutual friends. A small world is now, it seems, even smaller.

Can this be used to solve real-world problems, by taking advantage of the talents and connections of one’s friends, and their friends? That is the aim of a new field known as social mobilisation, which treats the population as a distributed knowledge resource which can be tapped using modern technology. It could potentially be used to help locate missing children, find a stolen car or track down a suspect. Social-mobilisation researchers have been examining its potential through some unusual experiments.

Of businessmen and ballerinas

Schumpeter

Of businessmen and ballerinas

Lessons from the Bolshoi brouhaha

Feb 9th 2013 |From the print edition of the Economist

THE basic facts of the case seem clear—and as dramatic as any performance of Prokofiev’s “Ivan the Terrible”. Sergei Filin, the Bolshoi ballet’s artistic director, arrived home shortly before midnight on January 17th. A masked man emerged from the shadows and flung sulphuric acid in his face. A car-park attendant tried to wash away the acid with snow. But it was too late. Mr Filin’s face and eyes had been badly burned. He is now recuperating in a German hospital.

Making sense of this horrific assault is tricky. One school of thought blames artistic squabbles. The Bolshoi has seen several nasty incidents. Mr Filin’s tyres have been slashed and his e-mail hacked. In the past, needles have been inserted into costumes and broken glass into the tips of ballet shoes. A dead cat has been tossed onto the stage in lieu of flowers and an alarm clock set off during a quiet scene. Ballet is not for sissies.

A third school focuses on sex. The ballet is a hothouse of passion and intrigue. Anastasia Volochkova, a former prima ballerina, once called it a “big brothel”. Two years ago Gennady Yanin, a ballet director, resigned when pictures of him engaged in gay sex appeared online. The heterosexual Mr Filin is so good-looking that men and women alike are infatuated with him.A second school focuses on money and power. Scalpers have made wodges from buying and selling tickets—perhaps with inside help. Bigwigs use their muscle to get their pretty daughters jobs as ballerinas. A lavish renovation of the Bolshoi theatre suffered epic delays and went wildly over-budget.

All this is gripping stuff, but what does any of it have to do with business? Why is Schumpeter, whose subject is people in suits, fussing about people in tights? One answer is that peculiar institutions can tell us a lot about more run-of-the-mill ones. And dysfunction is more common in the business world than you might think. Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School, says that he has been struck, at alumni reunions, by how many of his fellow HBS graduates and Rhodes scholars had made a mess of their lives. Jeff Skilling, for example, had gone from making $100m a year as boss of Enron to a federal prison.

A quick glance around any office suggests that dark passions lurk everywhere. Gossip and back-stabbing are rife. (Schumpeter could tell you a thing or two about his editor.) In all companies, bosses wield power, which tends to corrupt. One delightful study shows that giving people power makes them more likely to cheat at games. It also makes them keener to suggest harsh punishments for others who are caught cheating.

All these problems are evergreen. However, three modern trends are making them worse. The first is the enthusiasm for rewarding employees for performance. This is driven by the reasonable insight that paying everyone the same spurs no one to excel. Alas, paying for performance can also have perverse consequences. Banks that pay big bonuses for big profits give traders an incentive to take big risks. Institutions that reward relative performance (ie, did you perform better than your colleagues?) encourage unscrupulous co-workers to sabotage each other. Dancers at the Bolshoi are paid primarily according to the amount of time they spend on stage, so an understudy may not be completely heartbroken if the lead ballerina breaks an ankle.

The second is the economic downturn. Towers Watson, a consultancy, says it has created a class of “trauma organisations” that must take drastic measures to survive. Staff at such companies tend to be pessimistic and cliquish—they huddle together for comfort in the storm. Even in non-traumatised companies, many workers resent having to work harder for stagnant pay. Towers Watson reports that only 44% of British workers have confidence in their leaders.

The third trend is the rise of knowledge-intensive companies that run on “economies of ideas” rather than economies of scale. These companies are all hungry for the best and brightest: for the brilliant pharmacologist who can create a blockbuster drug, for the extraordinary investment banker who can engineer an industry-changing merger or for the razor-sharp accountant who can shave millions off a firm’s tax bill.

The need to hire the best means firms have to put up with prima donnas. That has costs. Talent-driven firms can be torn apart by feuds or rendered dysfunctional by egocentric behaviour: clever people are as clever at finding reasons to argue with each other as they are at thinking up new ideas.

Stars can burn you

A creative environment can often be a toxic one. You may have noticed that films about Hollywood always show beautiful people doing ugly things to each other. One assumes that the directors and screenwriters know whereof they speak. Outside Tinseltown, too, some of the most toxic companies have also been some of the most creative. Enron was once revered for revolutionising the energy business. Lehman Brothers was regarded as the smartest of the smart.

Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, was a genius. He was also “frequently obnoxious, rude, selfish and nasty to other people”, according to Walter Isaacson, his biographer. He crushed rivals who stood in his path. He enjoyed humiliating people who were less than A-players. He once stormed into a meeting with suppliers and bellowed that they were “fucking dickless assholes”. Joe Nocera, a journalist, commented on his “almost wilful lack of tact”. But this very abrasiveness was essential to Apple’s success—it kept the company passenger-free and relentlessly focused on producing the next big thing. As the poet John Dryden once put it: “Great wits are sure to madness near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”

Mind Your Keystrokes !

From an article ( Credit Scores) in the Economist:

" As statistics get better, algorithms get better at spotting correlations in the data.Applicants who type only in lower case letters, or entirely in the upper case, are less likely to repay loans. other factors being equal, says Douglas Merrill of Zest Finance, an American Online lender whose default rate is 40 % lower."

RSK

Birds-of-Paradise Project

Pl click this link:

http://www.cornell.edu/video/?VideoID=2398