46/ 100 Shadow Dog
Safe Amongst the Chaos
I wrote a little story yesterday about the problems we had accessing the Shree cafe that had the unfortunate virtue of being situated on the main route to the Shri Kashi Vishwanath Temple. I assume that it is normally a great draw for the hungry tourists on their way to the famous temple but during our trip it was almost invisible behind an impenetrable wall of brightly coloured worshippers.
Kashi Vishwanath Temple is one of the most famous temples in Varanasi, also known as the Golden temple dedicated to the Lord Shiva. It was constructed in the year 1780¹ and has no doubt received a steady stream of visitors ever since. So why was it so ridiculously busy when we were visiting?
The reason was the Kumbh Mela. Perhaps the world’s biggest religious festival, it is held every 12 years with a half-mela in between. On the twelfth 12-year anniversary the festival becomes a mega-kumbh (I made that term up) with an insane number of devotees flocking to the town of Prayagraj just a couple of hours down the river from Varanasi. On any given day it was reported that 14 million people bathed in the Ganges in that one town, with over 650 million visitors during the 45 day festival. The population of Scotland, where I live, is about 5.5 million.
When the pilgrims had bathed at the Kumbh Mela they would then travel up to Varanasi to cram in as much religious activity as they possibly could before going home. This meant that the streets were insanely busy and our daily itinerary had to be carefully choreographed to fit around all the people. There were places we physically couldn’t reach (well, places we weren’t prepared to fight to get to).
It was reported in the news that at least 30 people were killed and many more were injured in one stampede at the official Mela this year². The sheer volume of visitors and their religious fever was simply too much to contain and tragedy struck.
In a sign that people really do care for the dogs, even though many people here see them living on the street and assume they are mistreated, consider that the dog in today’s photograph is living right on the busy and narrow path to the temple. From January 13 to February 18, over 19.3 million pilgrims visited the temple, averaging approximately 536,000 visitors per day during this 36-day period³. There were two main routes to the temple so around half of those people walked up this little pathway.
Despite this unfathomable number of passers-by, who themselves had no space whatsoever, they all flowed around this dog and, as you can see, had even given it some biscuits that day.
