The Kumbh Mela is not about facts and figures, nor photogenic tribes of sadhus colouring the front pages, organisation, logistics, celebrity visits, multi million dollar ashrams or the new tourist phenomenon. It is everything about ordinary people celebrating their religion. If 70 million attended, then 69 million were made up of the faces seen in every town, city and village in India. Theirs is a personal pilgrimage, and if they appear an amorphous mass on pictures, each had made their own commitment to be there, a personal absolution to make. Unheralded and calm, they were the true Mela's current, the spiritual force flowing in those mighty rivers.

Take the two middle aged business men we met from Delhi, just arrived, skipping joyously, hand in hand towards the Sangram.Excited, happy to chatter but enticed and drawn to the water, to bathe, the fulfilment of their pilgrimage. Joy in the conviction that their newly cleansed spirituality would bring them.

The headlines, the drama and the shear scale should not divert us from the real essence behind the Mela. The people's people, the hearts and souls of the country making their quiet personal pilgrimages of a life time.

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The Kumbh site is positioned on the fine sand bed exposed by the Ganges and the Yamuna rivers out of the monsoon. A vast expense of colourful tents and marquees erected by religious groups to act as gathering points and shelters for their followers. Despite India's reputation, the organisation, cleanliness and toilet facilities would put Glastonbury to shame.

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Bathing is not confined to the auspicious main bathing days, it is a dawn to dusk activity. Streams of pilgrims enact a variety of ritualised submersions, blessings, offerings and swallowing of the holy water. Women who bathe clothed, dry their unwrapped saris in bright billowing clouds of fabric on the bank.
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The Sangram, mystical meeting point of India's 3 holiest rivers - a sand bank a hundred meters from the shore. Each pilgrim paying a few rupees to one of hundreds of boatmen in crafts whose designed are unchanged by the centuries. To westerners, the site is of the biblical sea of Galilee; in India, it is contemporary timelessness.