Why: Kumbh Mela, the largest human gathering on earth, is recurrently apprehended negatively in India by a large part of the Indian populace and media. Although there exists a large volume of visual as well as literary texts documenting and describing the Kumbh, most of it is scholarly and inaccessible or personal and biased. Very often, the intentional or unintentional omission of context and relevance leads to an exoticism which distances the audience from the essence of the content. This leaves a vast number of interested people without a means to an informed yet engaging overview on this cultural, historical, and spiritual landmark event.

We wish to capture the positive essence of the Kumbh to bridge the rift between the people with faith and those without.

How: The team will visit the Kumbh at Allahabad in Jan/Feb 2013 to gather data first-hand from the field. Myths, stories, and experiences will be collected through interviews with a myriad of people involved in this massive event. Our own "outside" perspective will be balanced through an honest and clear rendering of collected anecdotes and experiences.

The result is to be an expression of the collective, spiritual consciousness of a people.

For Whom: The book and film will be particularly though not exclusively targeted at a young, uninformed yet interested audience.

Driven by: We are doing this project out of our deep-rooted passion for creative communication through design, writing, photography, and film. What holds the team together is our common quest to find meaning and reason within our experiences of India and its culture.