The banks of the river at Allahabad's Sangam were lined with boats that ferried people across the water to the point where the Ganga and the Jamuna rivers meet. There were dozens of such boats, each boat filled with 8-20 people. Several people were standing by the water’s edge, dipping into the river waters to cleanse themselves. This confluence of the two rivers was an intriguing phenomenon as it brought together diverse elements: the Jamuna with bluish water and the Ganga with muddy brown water; the Jamuna almost 40 feet deep and the Ganga only 4 feet deep; the Jamuna with the boats afloat on top of the water and the Ganga with people wading in knee deep waters as though there was an invisible line marking the boundary between the two bodies of water. It was a strange sight but so much in keeping with the strange juxtapositions that you find everywhere in India, and so reflective of the large and varied universe of which we all are a part – the deep and the shallow; the clean and the muddy; the old and the young and all those in-between; people from different parts of India looking different and speaking in different languages; a collage of boats that were carrying myriad human beings; the birds that were being fed by the people; the waters that were touching all and washing away the sins from the breathing bodies of those still alive and from the ashes of those who had just died...
Sangam - a merging, a coming together, a meeting, a mingling, a confluence - of diverse energies, life forms, sins and virtues, the pure and the impure, life and death, the material and the spiritual, god and man…