Arriving at the Kumbh with only a blanket and a walking stick from a village 700 kilometres away, Uday Veer, an ardent devotee of lord Shiva in his seventies, says ‘ I have been coming here regularly with my family of seven for the last 23 years now. But it has never happened that we have had to sleep with an empty stomach‘

Uday veer is the grateful beneficiary of the Hindu scripture that says that feeding the common man for free is like feeding god himself: Here at the Kumbh, over 60 voluntary organisations are feeding nearly fifty thousand devotees on a daily basis.

Bhandaras or Anna Kshetras, as these free dining services are called in the local dialect, consume a major chunk of the raw food materials of the Uttar Pradesh state during the Mela period. Yogesh Sharma, the main chef in Maruti Ram Baba’s camp says, up to 14,000 thousand pilgrims are fed on a daily basis in the camp, between 10a.m. and 7p.m. About half a ton of Basmati rice, puris (the Indian bread fried in oil) made out of 500 kilograms of flour, along with vegetables and sweets prepared in similar proportions, are served to the pilgrim masses every day.

‘We never stop anybody from coming in to have food even past the closing time,’ says the Maruti Ram Baba, ‘We feed them because, according to Hindu scriptures, God could be present anywhere and in any form, probably under the garb of an ordinary devotee in my camp.’

An amazing feat just in sheer physical terms, the cooking goes on in 12-hour shifts in scorching kitchens - motivated, it seems, by faith alone: Chote lal, one of the cooks, comments ‘I have been coming for the last nine years to the Mela to render my service as a cook in these free food centres. It is a form of penance to me’

Moreover, it is not only locals but also Indians living abroad who turn up to render their services in these camps, with the belief that this will earn them ‘Punya’ or heavenly blessings. Mukesh Patel, a postman from Wembley, has come to the mela for the fifth time in succession and will probably come again next time. Mukesh says, ‘I have come here to serve the people irrespective of their caste, creed, religion or social status, because according to the Hindu religion serving humanity is the same as serving the supreme being’.

Besides the free dining centres, charitable services in the Mela also extend to medical aid posts providing treatment like Acupuncture, Homeopathy, Ayurveda and Allopathy to scores of devotees - miles from their homes. There are even foreign volunteers working round the clock at the Mela’s lost and found centres. The scale of generosity here almost defies comprehension.