I The quality of Ganga water varies, and it may be safe to drink in
some areas but not in others. The water may contain harmful bacteria and
other microbes that can cause disease.
Safety
Water quality: The quality of Ganga water can vary depending on the
location and time of year.
Pollution: The river can be polluted by harmful chemicals and
microorganisms. KANPUR area is the worst.
Disease-causing bacteria: The river can contain disease-causing bacteria,
including those that cause tuberculosis, pneumonia, cholera, and urinary
tract infections.
Drinking
Drinking in some areas
Some research has found that Ganga water in certain areas is fit for
drinking. However, other research has found that the water in some areas is
not fit for drinking.
Drinking from the river
Drinking water directly from a river is not safe because it can contain
dirt, harmful bacteria, and other microbes.
Buying Gangajal
Buy from authorized firms
Only buy Gangajal from a government-authorized firm that is legally
licensed to draw, pack, and supply the water.
Be aware of fake claims
Some firms claim to supply Gangajal directly from Gangotri, but this is
misleading.
II Waters of the Ganges could offer an experimental reprieve:
{RESEARCH MATERIALS OF NATIONAL INSTT OF SCIENCE N INDIA}
One could use Ganga jal on a patient (mareez), and then conduct a
culture on a sample of their stool. We'll then be able to see whether,
through the medium of the Ganga's water, the bacteriophage has any impact
on the gastro-intestinal system or not. If it has a beneficial impact, I'm
thinking that it can be deployed in a number of areas. It can serve as a
therapeutic option (vikalp). One can see whether a person can be
administered the water once or twice a month. The durations can then be
adjusted or stopped, as needed. One must conduct research to see how long
these viruses last in the body. If the body eliminates them after they kill
the bacteria, it might be the case that Ganga's waters might be consumed
daily in tiny amounts, say 10 ml, as an inoculum. More, and the water will
make you sick!
I find it fascinating that the Ganga's waters are given to the
dying person in their mouth for liberation (moksha). I wonder if that act
has a connection to bacteriophages. Perhaps, upon death, what starts as the
body's process of disintegration by rotting (saṛan)—which we call
‘categoric lividity’—can be slowed down? Perhaps, because the body can then
be kept appropriately for the last rites (antim sanskaar), there will be no
issue with the soul's onward journey. Who knows? There are so many
explanations! Whether you burn or bury a body, it is desirable to control
its bacterial content before its disposal. Perhaps, with bacteriophages,
you are serving the community by not allowing that polluting bacteria
(pradushan) to spread in the environment? That is why, perhaps, when people
drown in Ganga ji, or take dips, it is considered that they have been
purified (swacch ho gaye).
The practical lesson here is that we can only dream of moksha if we
can purify the community (samaj ko swachh), if we can give society
something even in our death, if we don't spread polluting practices on
Earth. Moksha means we will go to heaven only when we stop spreading filth
in our life and our rivers. This is also the lesson of Ayurvedic
remedy—keep a healthful person healthy (swastha se swasthya rakshanam).
Ayurveda speaks about general health—health is at once mental, physical,
social and spiritual wellbeing, not only the absence of disease (san
bhushan samarey sam dhatu bal kriya/Prasann). This is why the Ganga ji's
bacteriophages raise the question of social health. That, even in the time
of our death, we don't spread the causes of ill-health in society.
* the significances of bacteriophages: *Bacteriophages
have a robust future. In the twenty-first century, these ecologically
ubiquitous viral predators of bacteria have multiple lives in the modern
biosciences. They are foundational to the unfolding story of CRISPR
genome-editing tools—based on the adaptive immune systems of bacteria
infected by bacteriophages—now being deployed, potentially, for human
germline transformations. Simultaneously, bacteriophages retain a crucial
role as workhorses of modern molecular biology and genetics, continuing
their twentieth-century history as experimental organisms for basic
scientific experimentation and epistemology. At the same time,
bacteriophages are being (re)invoked—following their Soviet deployment—as
contemporary antibacterial agents in a time where the slower contagion of
AMR is proliferating across the planet. Further, phages are increasingly
instrumental to our evolving understanding of biochemical processes at the
level of the individual microbiome and the planetary carbon and nitrogen
cycles, given their role in the infection, elimination and recycling of
nearly 40% of the planet's marine bacterial cells on a daily basis. Yet, if
bacteriophages have been ‘machines for making the future’, they arrive,
conceptually, from a knotted history of myth and indigenous-scientific
epistemes of damage and recovery.
Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi,
surveyed by the article, track how winding over 1,500 miles to the Bay of
Bengal, Ma Ganga—‘Mother Ganges’—eventually becomes one of the planet's
most polluted rivers, a mélange of urban sewage, animal waste, pesticides,
fertilizers, industrial metals and rivulets of ashes from cremated
bodies.Yet, if the current fate of the Ganges offers clues to the global
spread of antibiotic resistance—‘one of the world's most daunting health
problems [that render] germs impervious to common medicines’—the river has
an interesting history that is also tied up with its bacterial load. –“it
was this river that introduced us to bacteriophages in 1896, viruses that
devoured bacteria, pathogens included. One has to wonder what it is that is
present in the Ganges, perhaps in the bed or even the waters, that can
support an existence of so many pathogens and yet not decimate the
population of pilgrims that visit in enormous throngs. ‘
While I (THE RESEARCHER) was conducting ethnographic fieldwork in
Allahabad in 2019, my movements around the sangam and the Kumbh Mela were
routinely disrupted. Politicians and VIPs regularly attended the event in
SUVs with large coteries of followers and gun-toting bodyguards, impeding
the ordinary flow of devotees and pilgrims. They performed religious
rituals by the banks of the riverine confluence and carried out official
functions beyond the pale of a secular constitutional state, including
chairing ministerial meetings by the sangam, inaugurating religious
functions and providing patronage to explicitly religious groups and
individuals. While always a heavily mediatized event that is broadcast
globally, this version of the Mela in an election year had its name changed
by bureaucratic fiat from an ‘ardh Kumbh’ (calendrically scheduled every
six years) to the more prestigious ‘Kumbh’ named after the 12-yearly
iteration of the event. Before the Mela, the city's name was altered by
governmental orders with the aim of erasing the city's intimate cultural
connections with the Mughal emperor Akbar. As such, the Mela in 2019 was
specifically engineered towards achieving a politics that blended electoral
triumph, state power and religious majoritarianism. Today, the phage and
Kumbh Mela are increasingly hostage to a politics in which Hankin's
findings are routinely called upon to aggrandize a particular history and
statecraft. Yet, if this paper has argued anything, it is that the phage
and the constellation that surrounds it is much more, and much more
complex, than these reductive political machinations and their
instrumentalist views of science.
For many of my interlocutors, the spiritually purifying and
bactericidal qualities of the Ganges waters remained conflated. They
regarded Hankin's findings as scientific confirmations of older orders of
sacrality and cultural truths—a sacrality that holds the Ganga jal's
spiritual-purification and self-purification qualities as co-equal and
co-present. Some respondents expressed concern regarding the spectacle of
the Kumbh Mela and bathing with Ganga jal in the river, which they regarded
as having devolved from a spiritually important pilgrimage to a vulgar
display of power and prominence. The pollution of the river, further
confirmation for them of this vulgarity, meant that what was spiritually
purifying as well as bactericidal was no longer as effective as it once was.
If Hankin's findings were, once upon a time, scientific elaborations of
truths already foretold in other sources, the ecological and political
degradations of the Ganges and the Kumbh Mela today generate scepticism for
some regarding the conflation of the scientific and the mythic forms of
reason. However, this scepticism, too, derives from myths and textual
sources that foretell the doom of the rivers. Other respondents dealt
differently with the conflation of the scientific and mythic orders in the
Ganga jal: some were happy to make that connection for strategizing
patronage from the authorities; others did not believe in any connection
between the spiritual and the scientific but continue to make use of the
waters out of force of habit, upbringing or the pursuit of grace. (END)
III The Yamuna is the most polluted river in India in 2024. It
is also one of the most polluted rivers in the world.
Explanation
The Yamuna is a 1,375 km long river that originates in the Himalayas and
flows through the states of Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh.
The Yamuna is polluted by sewage, industrial waste, and farm pesticides.
The Yamuna is a tributary of the Ganges.
The Yamuna is considered sacred by Hindus.
The Yamuna is polluted by people and industries in cities like Delhi, Agra,
and Mathura.
The Yamuna is polluted despite laws against pollution and the construction
of sewage treatment plants.
IV {INDIAN EXPRESS 2016} “Analysis of the fresh water
sedimentary metagenome-viromes revealed that the holy river Ganges not only
house novel viromes, but also include unexplored double stranded DNA
viruses,” The Indian Science Journal quotes Dr. Shanmugam Mayilraj, Senior
Principal Scientist at the CSIR-Institute of Microbial Technology,
Chandigarh, as saying.
It is for the first time, scientists have come across new viruses.
Dr. Mayilraj said, the fresh water sediments from the Ganges house several
novel viruses, which were never reported earlier. These bacteriophages are
active against certain clinical isolates, or viral strains and can be used
against multi-drug resistant or MDR infections.
Dr. Mayilraj and his team has identified 20-25 interesting viruses, which
can be used for treatment of tuberculosis (Mycobacterium), typhoid
(Salmonella), pneumonia (Klebsiella and Acinetobactor), cholera (Vibrio),
dysentery (Shigella), diarrhoea (Aeromonoas) meningitis (Cronobacter), etc.
“Our findings revealed variety of different bacteriophages, which have
specific bactericidal characteristics,” Dr. S. Mayilraj told Indian Science
Journal. “Current analysis showed that the water was enriched with several
strains of bacterial groups like Oscillatoriphycudeae, Flavobacteria,
Sphingobacteria, a-proteobacteria, ß-proteobacteria, ?-proteobacteria and
Nostocophycideae, whereas sediment was enriched with ß-proteobacteria,
?-proteobacteria, a-proteobacteria, Clostridia, Actinobacteria,
Sphingobacteria and Deltaproteobacteria.”
The IMTECH team has already collected samples, during the pre-monsoon and
post-monsoon period from the Haridwar to Varanasi stretch of the Ganges,
which is highly polluted. They would now collect water samples from Yamuna
and Narmada rivers for a comparative study to see, how water in the Ganges
is different.
The study was commissioned by federal Water Resources and Ganga
Rejuvenation Ministry, headed by Kum. Uma Bharati in November, 2014.
Besides IMTECH, Nagpur-based National Environment Engineering Research
Institute (NEERI), National Botanical Research Institute, Indian Institute
Toxicology Research and Central Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants,
all in Lucknow are part the project. The consolidated report of all the
Labs involved in the current study would be submitted to the government by
December 2016.
Several scientists in the past – Indian and international, have found
certain clinical properties of Ganga water, but it is for the credit of
microbiologists of IMTECH to identify them.
The River Ganges has a special place for devout Hindus, who consider it
sacred and personification of Goddess Ganga. They believe a dip in the holy
river on certain days putrefy them of their sins and facilitates Moksha or
liberation from the cycle of life and death, as water of Ganga is
considered very pure.
Finally we cannot take Ganga water purity for granted.
K Rajaram IRS 28125
On Tue, 28 Jan 2025 at 17:13, Narayanaswamy Sekar <[email protected]>
wrote:
>
>
>
> 💥 *THE BIGGEST GATHERING OF HUMANITY ON THE PLANET EARTH IS THE LARGEST
> RELIGIOUS GATHERING OF HINDUS*
> ~ Khalid Umar
>
> (Brilliant post... I wanted to edit and make it shorter, but couldn't
> delete even a single sentence. MUST Read...)
>
> It’s pure joy and ecstasy.
>
> *NO ANIMAL SCARIFICES, NO BLOODSHED, NO UNIFORM, NO VIOLENCE, NO POLITICS,
> NO CONVERSIONS, NO SECTS, NO SEGREGATION, NO TRADE, NO BUSINESS.*
>
> *IT’S HINDUISM.*
>
> Nowhere else HUMANS ever congregate(d) for a single event in such a
> number; be that religious, sports, war, funeral or festivity. It’s always
> been the KUMBH mela and this year it’s Maha Kumbh, which is celebrated
> every 144 years.
>
> The world of statistics look with awe at the statistics; 400 million
> people over 44 days, over 15 million taking the holy dip on the first day,
> a temporary city across 4,000 hectares, 150,000 tents, 3,000 kitchens,
> 145,000 restrooms, with 40,000 security personnel, 2,700 AI-enabled
> cameras, etc. These are mind boggling statistics but is not what makes me
> wonder.
>
> MY AWE IS NOT ABOUT MATERIALISM, STATISTICS OR PHYSICAL ASPECTS OF THIS
> EVENT
>
> It’s not about what our eyes can see. It’s not about size or numbers.
> What amazes me is (what we call ancient) knowledge of the humanity’s
> connection with the universe.
>
> *It amazes me that its rituals are performed with reference to the
> alignment, positioning and timing of the celestial bodies in the heavens
> signifying human relationship with the Cosmos and its physical and
> spiritual effect on human destiny and future.*
>
> It has no power structure or political polity driving it. It’s indigenous
> to the faith. It’s not about an organised religion. It’s not about a
> hierarchy.
>
> *This Hindus Dharma’s understanding of the humanity’s relationship with
> the universe, from vegetation (under our feet) to the stars (in the milky
> way) is an evidence of the advanced knowledge in Hinduism which has
> extraterrestrial roots & connections.*
>
> *The meditating Sadhus’ consciousness is able to reach frontiers beyond
> space & time. It breaks the illusion of duality of me & the universe.*
>
> BEYOND MATERIAL SCIENCE
>
> I think today’s space travel through rockets is a primitive technology.
> Our physical bodies are not us. We don’t need to physically travel anywhere
> as once we understand that we are souls having a physical experience, from
> localised particles, we become infinite, part of the whole, present
> everywhere, as entangled particles exhibit; distance and time barriers lose
> existence. When we become pure consciousness; part of the divine light;
> timeless and formless.
>
> *It’s the awe when Sadhus of Himalayas and Quantum mechanics take a holy
> dip together in the vast ocean of knowledge. It’s not enough to say that
> Hinduism is aligned with nature. There is no duality; it’s nature itself.
> Being a Hindu is coming back to your natural state.*
>
> 💥
> _*A little scientific note on the Ganga Jal.... During my service at the
> KEM hospital.... I was ASSOCIATED with the Late Dr.S.R. Kamath a very
> RENOWNED Chest Specialist.....*_
>
> *We were discussing the Kumbh to be taking place in the then
> Allahabad..... Sir decided to do a Microbilogical study of the Ganga
> Jal....*
>
> _We were keen to know .... After lacs take a dip NOBODY COMES UP WITH ANY
> INFECTIONS...._
>
> *So he sent a person with sterile bottles and INSTRUCTED to collect Ganga
> water from 5 different places....*
> 1. From the banks
> 2. A little away
> 3. On the other side of the shore
> 4. From the MIDDLE and
> 5. Most important from where maximum people were taking a dip...
>
> _One set of 5 bottles I took to my lab for Bacteriological studies and
> another set was sent to Haffkines for counter check for Bacteriology and
> for Virology...._
>
> *The results were shocking.... NONE OF MY 5 SAMPLES GREW ANY BACTERIA....
> THE 5 SAMPLES SENT TO HAFFKINES ALSO SHOWED NO
> BACTERIA BUT THE SAMPLES HAD A VERY HIGH CONCENTRATION OF
> BACTERIOPHAGES.....*
> _*What are Bacteriophages ....They are viruses which feed on
> bacteria.....*_
>
> _THIS EXPLAINED WHY MY SAMPLES TESTED DID NOT GROW ANY ORGANISM.....
> It also explains why we have not seen any epidemic so far in spite of
> millions of people taking a dip........_
>
> *FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE OF THE MYSTICS OF THE KUMBH.......*
>
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "Thatha_Patty" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to [email protected].
> To view this discussion visit
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CABC81ZeOB3AYazdVh6cYFNAFk1CC-qXv2QaB4j2Eqi%2Bd2pmO%2Bw%40mail.gmail.com
> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CABC81ZeOB3AYazdVh6cYFNAFk1CC-qXv2QaB4j2Eqi%2Bd2pmO%2Bw%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>
> .
>
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Thatha_Patty" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To view this discussion visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CAL5XZop5DsjqC4ek%3Dg_aUYBZ1BZKWh%2B%2BL_9mvMkP9kNVnkYOyA%40mail.gmail.com.
