A muse about muses: Q&A
With a few more thoughts about Kumbh Mela
I thank my ex-student for these questions. He did not want to be identified.
[No that is not him with the long hair in the photo below. It is a display of how exhibitionists and voyeurs get their jollies at the Kumbh Mela. It is a place to see and to be seen.]
Q: Show me the money - how many muses have you got?
I have posted over one hundred.
Q: Over what time period?
About two years. So, it comes out to about once a week - on the average. But there is no weekly schedule. When I got badly affected by chemotherapy, I wrote nothing - for weeks.
Q: Where do you get your ideas?
Recent news. Old news. Some historical events. I write about personal things. My own trials with cancer treatment and being run over by a car. Not fun things but it is a form of catharsis.
I will give you an example of how these things evolve. Recently I wrote a piece on Kumbh Mela.
Maha Kumbh Mela - the Big Pot Festival
Kumbh Mela festival has opened in Prayag. Organizers are expecting 400+ million people - the largest gathering of humanity. [It does not mean all of them will show up at once.]Thanks for reading Tapen’s Muse! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
I noticed that everybody is crowing over how this is *Maha* Kumbh Mela - the culmination of a cycle of 12x12=144 years. Logically then, the previous big gathering of the mega event would be 1881. There was NO Kumbh Mela that year. It *was* held in 1882. The news was reported: "Kumbh Mela Notes from Our Native Correspondent," Pioneer, 25 January 1882. There was a bitter infighting among different unions (akharas) who organized them. There was violence. So, 1882 was a tepid year for the Mela. Hardly a Maha Kumbh Mela.
Today, every damn news outlet is crowing about this 144 year cycle again.
The most pathetic display was on BBC
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg7gzzx3gno
Hindu seer Mahant Ravindra Puri said the festival this time round was "extra special" and described it as "a Maha [great] Kumbh". "That's because the current alignment of planets and stars is identical to what existed at the moment of the spill," he told the BBC. "Such perfection is being observed after 12 Kumbh festivals or 144 years," he said.
Q: What is wrong with it?
If the BBC reporter had read their *own* past reports, especially the one from 2013, he would have discovered the following line.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20130116-india-hosts-the-worlds-biggest-gathering
Thanks to an unusual alignment of the planets, this year’s event is even more auspicious than normal. In fact, the last time there was one this important was 144 years ago and the next will not be until around 2157.
Q: So, you mean they did not fact check?
Not just them, all the Indian news outlets are spouting this nonsense. Here is an example.
Q: How did that happen?
Originally, there were three types: Ardh (half) Kumbh Mela, Kumbh Mela and Maha Kumbh Mela (Ardh Kumbh, every six years, Kumbh, every twelve and Maha Kumbh, every 12x12=144 years). This one in 2025 should have been just Kumbh Mela. The Chief Minister of UP decided to declare this one a *Maha* Kumbh Mela. He wants to play nationally. He wants to be seen as the successor of Mr Modi. This is politics - pure and simple.
Q: Is this the first *political* Kumbh Mela?
Oh no!
Consider what happened in 1954. It was billed as the first Kumbh Mela without foreign rule in Delhi in a millennium.
It was visited by bigwigs from the Central Government. The President of India, Rajendra Prasad, the President of the UN General Assembly, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (sister of Jawaharlal Nehru), UP Chief Minister, Govind Ballabh Pant, Union Railway Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri - all did inspections. Pant addressed the assembled pilgrims, asking them to use the opportunity of the mela to “take a vow to serve the country.” Indira Gandhi (as a member of Congress Working Committee) spent two days at the mela grounds, inspecting various camps, urging “people to help build New India,” before hoisting the national flag in a ceremony on January 20, 1954.
Rajendra Prasad inspects 1954 Kumbh.
GB Pant arrives at the Kumbh 1954.
Q: Did Nehru take any interest? After all, he grew up in Allahabad.
Mr Nehru was also there.
In the lead-up to the Mela, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru became personally involved in the arrangements and visited the site after he appointed his daughter as the person in charge, even though it was technically the jurisdiction of the Uttar Pradesh government.
When he was seen dipping his right hand in the water wearing cow leather shoes, one journalist asked him if he had a bath there. Nehru got visibly angry and ambiguously replied: “I had not a bodily dip but other dips.” He was trying to cozy up to the Hindu voters. [Dipping the right wrist is also a typical ritual.]
Ironically, the government imposed a tax on all the pilgrims in 1954 - exactly what the East India Company did in 1806. After an uproar, city residents were exempted. Others had to pay to play.
It was not the first foray of Mr Nehru in Kumbh Mela. He marched during the 1924 Ardh Kumbh Mela waving a national flag - hoping to attract attention of the police and get arrested. The police ignored him. In a postscript to a letter he wrote to A. T. Gidwani on January 25, 1924, he lamented: “There appears to be little chance of my arrest for the Kumbh Mela affray. Worse luck!”
Newspaper articles extolled the holiest Kumbh for 144 years in 1954. They detailed the modern facilities that were to be provided for the pilgrims.
Q: Wait. You mean to say the 1954 Kumbh Mela was billed as the end of the cycle of 144 years too?
Yes! Politics always overrules facts. It is true in 2025 as it was in 1954.
The saddest part was the stampede during the event. Between 500 and 1,000 people died. There was a huge party thrown by the office of the Prime Minister not far from the site of the Mela. No guest was told about the tragedy. After the Mela, a color documentary was produced. It proudly broadcast all the security arrangements made to make the Mela safe. Not a single mention was made in this government documentary film about the hundreds of lives lost there. Talk about suppression of information on a grand scale!
The scale of the death toll is still not known. Many dead bodies were simply dumped into the river. A Commission was set up. Predictably, it found no culpability of the Prime Minister or any other government official.
Q: That’s terrible!
My original muse/rant was going to be on *that*. Then, I realized that most people do not know the basics of Kumbh Mela in the first place. So, I changed tack! I did not want to get into the weeds - it would become a very long piece.
I see what you did there.
Instead of including this bit in your piece on Kumbh Mela, you included it in the Muse about Muses. Clever!
You are a quick learner.
Q: How long is each piece you publish?
That would be 1,000 to 1,500 words per post plus pictures and sometimes videos.
Q: Why not make them longer?
People will not read them.
Q: Why don’t you add more pictures to make it easier to read?
Embedded photos take up space. So do embedded videos. They are space hogs. So, when the subscriber gets an email delivery, it might get booted if the mail is attachment heavy. Different email services have different limits. So, I try to stay away from picture/video heavy posts.
Q: Why not embed Youtube links?
Ninety five percent readers do not click on my links. [I have the data to back my claim up.]
Q: How long does it take to write your muse?
If I am writing on something, usually it requires a lot of fact finding. It might need a precise set of numbers. All of that takes time. It would take me at least four hours to put it all together - not counting prior searches.
Q: So, you can easily produce one in a few days. Right?
Not quite. Some I write for weeks. Some I write for months. Unless it is time bound in some ways, it does not matter. For example, I wrote some on the general election in India. Obviously that needs to coincide with the timing of the general election last year. Similarly for the Mexican or the UK elections.
Q: How much have you written so far?
I estimate I have published some 120,000 words in total. If you include the pictures, these muses together will make a book.
Q: Why not publish them as a book?
Unless I publish it through some vanity press or self publish, no sane publisher would touch it. You do see regular newspaper columnists publish their columns collected in books. For example, Paul Krugman has a couple. For a different generation, Khushwant Singh had a whole bunch. [Somebody once told Khushwant Singh, “You have made bullshit into an art form.”] But, these people are already famous public intellectuals. I am not.
Q: Who reads your muses?
Half of my readers are native Spanish speakers but with excellent grasp of English. In the other group, a good portion are of Indian origin. There are some who subscribe but - I have no idea about their identities. So, when I write something, I keep all those things in mind. It does not mean that every post will interest every reader.
Each post starts its life as a txt file. I am putting together words, phrases, and sentences from the source material.
Then, I bang them into shape in Google Docs.
Finally, I transfer them to the Substack editor. The advantage of starting with a txt file is that you have no hidden format quirk suddenly showing up somewhere. The downside is that a txt file would not allow pictures. So, I create a placeholder like “devil.jpg” and then insert it at the Docs stage. But, if you copy and paste from Docs where you have two consecutive jpg files, Substack will ignore the second jpg file. Formatting is not the same in all these three mediums.
Thank you for answering the questions.
Anyone can churn out 500 or 1500 words, but to make the story interesting, amusing and totally authentic is a formidable challenge. I've known Tapen well for over 50 years, but he still continues and astonish and entertain.