It should be nice to be a BBC information presenter. The aspect hustles! Anybody made too weary by stonewalling politicians and all these late nights underneath an umbrella in Downing Avenue will virtually inevitably discover, courtesy of a beneficiant boss, some gentle aid within the type of a neater, lovelier gig elsewhere (until you’re Mishal Husain, probably the most gifted of all of them, during which case you’ll unaccountably have to move to the wilder shores of Bloomberg with out passing even a lot as Begin the Week). Sophie Raworth will get to drift around the Chelsea Flower Present. Fiona Bruce verbally polishes different individuals’s antiques. Clive Myrie just isn’t solely within the quiz grasp’s chair on Mastermind; he additionally will get to tootle across the nicer elements of Italy and the Caribbean with the BBC Two crew.
Amol Rajan presents Immediately on Radio 4, and the “hardest workforce quiz event”, College Problem, on BBC Two, which needs to be sufficient for anybody. However now right here he’s on BBC One, in an hour-long movie during which he travels to India for the Hindu pageant of Kumbh Mela, a gathering of greater than 400 million individuals – sure, actually – that takes place on the confluence of the rivers Ganges and Yamuna close to the town of Prayagraj roughly each six to 12 years. The twist right here, although, is that earlier than he units off, one senses some anxiousness, even dread, at what lies forward. Talking to his mom, who has been on the same pilgrimage herself, he worries about hygiene: he favours two showers a day. My guess is that he turned his journey into an project as a approach of forcing himself to do it. I do know this as a result of I’ve finished the identical factor myself; for no different motive however a deadline would I’ve travelled throughout Yemen with an armed guard who was half my top.
Rajan, although a cradle Hindu, describes himself as an atheist. However he has a sense of vacancy. Struggling to take care of the loss of life of his father three years in the past, he’s envious of the religious toolkit his mum has at her disposal. Within the waters of the Ganges, he’ll each purify himself and set the soul of his father on its approach, his final nice service to a person he adored, and this shall be cathartic – even when his two-in-one conditioner goes to be of little use all through his keep. He’ll really feel the cosmic vitality that’s throughout, in addition to the ft of a holy man he’ll therapeutic massage as an indication of respect for his elders.
I feel he goes for the cosmic vitality a bit too quickly. “I really feel small and humble and pious!” he proclaims from the melee, a declaration that means the exact reverse is true (see additionally when somebody proclaims: “I’ve acquired a fantastic sense of humour!”). However by no means thoughts. Occasions quickly intervene. As Rajan and his fixer try to move in direction of the waters, information reaches them that individuals have been crushed within the crowd; 30 are lifeless, lots of them sleeping pilgrims who had been trampled underneath foot, and 90 others are injured. Rajan is struck by individuals’s perspective to such a catastrophe. For him, it’s horrifying. For the extra religious, together with Aunt Lakshmi, who’s shortly to assist him carry out pind daan, an historical funeral ceremony, for his father, it’s nothing to get too heated about. There’s no distinction between life and loss of life, she tells him calmly.
Rajan selected to not interrogate this: by now, he was all in. “What a privilege to sit down on the ft of a smart woman,” he stated, as if he hadn’t labored with Martha Kearney all these years. Round him, the momentary metropolis the Modi authorities had constructed for the Kumbh Mela – 30 pontoon bridges, 135,000 bathrooms – ceaselessly shimmered and shook. Rajan may, he thought, have stepped via a wormhole. Within the Ganges eventually, he felt “as excessive as a kite”. What his viewers will make of this movie, nonetheless, is a special matter. Half documentary and half vainness undertaking – there’s simply no escaping his swimming trunks – it appeared to me to be half-hearted, in some way, its sincerity each unquestionable and strained. If the story of 1 man’s strange grief and the way he soothed it’s to work on display screen, good writing is significant: a story voice that paints the photographs we are able to’t see. However alas, Rajan was typically misplaced for phrases, his epiphany no extra expressive than a honking Prayagraj automotive horn.
Amol Rajan Goes to the Ganges
BBC One
[See also: The savagery of Alexander McQueen]