If you grew up in the culture of the drug war, you might not even know that cannabis and ‘marijuana’ are names for the same plant. Some people just think cannabis is a “hippy-thing” or part of “drug culture’ and are happy to leave it at that.
But hopefully you’ve avoided the taxpayer-funded social programming designed to make humans hostile towards useful plants or take an active interest in the ways cannabis intersects with and touches on everything from science to history to religious beliefs. Also a little known fact: Kumbh Mela begins on the same day as Martin Luther King Day in the United States. Scroll down and watch the short, intriguing documentary the NY Times produced on the festival.
So what is Kumbh Mela exactly? From Wikipedia: “. . . a major pilgrimage and festival for Hindus It is celebrated in a cycle of approximately every 12 years at four river-bank pilgrimage sites: the Allahabad (Prayag) (Ganges-Yamuna Sarasvati rivers confluence), Haridwar (Ganges), Nashik (Godavari), and Ujjain (Shipra).The festival is marked by a ritual dip in the waters, but it is also a celebration of the vibrant community with its numerous fairs, education, religious discourses by saints, mass feedings of monks and the poor, and entertainment spectacle.
The festival lasts for weeks and is the largest religious gathering in the world. Kumbh Mela, like cannabis, is goes back to ancient times. So it’s not at all surprising that cannabis plays a major role in the rituals and celebrations of Kumbh Mela.