Kaleidoscope City by Piers Moore Ede

Author:Piers Moore Ede [Ede, Piers Moore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620405581
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2015-02-04T06:00:00+00:00

The state of the Ganga began to occupy a lot of my thoughts. How had things become so bad? Was anything being done to change them? Were the Hindu leaders, whose faith sanctifies its every drop, involved in cleaning the river? Or is spiritual purity seen as entirely disconnected from such worldly matters as bacterial counts and faecal coliform levels? Everywhere in India now, there’s an overwhelming sense of movement: first the never-ending struggle to survive, and then the need to turn a profit. Were these pressures now so overwhelming that maintaining the health of the river simply fell off the radar? At what point would it grow so bad that the government would have no choice but to act? Surely, with so many millions depending on the river for their lives and livelihoods, the health of the Ganga should be a national priority?

One name quickly emerged in conjunction with these matters. There was a man sounding the call to action, and his story sounded intriguing. Sometimes referred to as Mahant-ji, the honorific accorded him as the head priest of Sankat Mochan temple at Tulsi Ghat, his real name is Veer Bhadra Mishra. A former professor of hydraulic engineering at Banaras Hindu University, his role as high priest at Tulsi Ghat made him one of the city’s most revered spiritual figures. Since the early 1980s he has almost single-handedly championed the issue of pollution on the Ganga, even making the United Nations Global Roll of Honour in 1987, in recognition of his environmental achievements. More than twenty years later, I wanted to meet him, both to see what he felt had been achieved during the last decades, and to understand a little more about the great fight for the health of India’s holy river.

Such a seemingly simple task, however, proved to be akin to scaling Everest. Veer Bhadra Mishra, now in his late seventies, is a busy man, and his health is failing. First, I spent many mornings at his office, fended off by the thorn hedge of bureaucracy that is India’s primary hurdle to an outsider. Endeavouring to wear down his retainers through sheer persistence, I dutifully filled in forms, returned with a typed letter, returned again when the letter yielded nothing. I brought recommendations, notes of character reference, copies of published work. The attendants seemed almost maliciously inured to my plight, greeting me each morning as if for the first time, scoffingly wagging their heads at the very notion of finding time in the Mahant’s schedule. I found the situation, by turns, frustrating, farcical, perhaps even some sort of divine test. Some mornings I could even see the back of the Mahant’s head beyond a doorway, apparently drinking chai by himself, but the notion that I should be allowed to speak with him seemed close to impertinent.

Finally, one morning, after noticing Professor Mishra once more ensconced on his chair in the room adjoining the office, I simply go in and sit down. None of the four people in

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