A Harvard book sheds light on why the world’s largest religious gathering is more efficiently put together than the biggest sporting spectacle on the globe.
Now here’s something you may have never come across if not backed by statistics supporting it. The magnitude of the FIFA World Cup should technically trump any event in terms of organizational difficulty owing to the fact that it takes place across an entire country, but according to the official website of the South Asia Insitite of the Harvard University, The Kumbh Mela of 2013 was far better organized than the world cup.
As far as cultural festivals go, the Kumbh Mela is the largest Hindu gathering of pilgrims in the world. The festival, which takes place during an auspicious time every three years, is celebrated at different locations depending on the position of the planet of Bṛhaspati (Jupiter) and the sun. Here’s a quote from the The Times of India:
“With 390 million communication events (calls, messages, etc) it saw largest use of cellphones at one place. If one individual goes through the call detail reports (CDRs) of mobile users at the Kumbh, giving just one second per call, it would take 12 years for him to go through the text messages and calls of just one company. Over 50 days, there were 146 million (145,736,764) text messages exchanged and 245 million (245,252,102) calls made.”
The 400 page book Kumbh Mela – Mapping the Ephemeral Mega-City sheds light on the human efforts involved in organizing the event within the infrastructure of the 24 sq km Kumbh City. The book was recently made public by Akhilesh Yadav, the Chief Minister of the state where the festival is held.
(Cover Image via: GQ India)
(H/T : First Post)