“That was close!” Avoiding danger at Ratha Yatras

Adi Kavi Das: Yesterday was the Jacksonville Ratha Yatra. I heard devotees praising how successful it was. The Mayor was there and blew a conchshell. He is favorable to the movement since his University of Florida days. The cart almost sunk in the sand of the beach but didn’t. We had a nice park to have the festival site at with a large covered pavilion and lots of people walking up and down the sidewalk the whole time. It was the first sunny day after two weeks of rain and lots of people were on the beach.

When I was a newer devotee one time I was given the service of guarding the wheel of the Ratha Cart during a procession. A devotee handed me a stick, said “don’t let the devotees get too close”, and left me there. Immediately upon the cart’s being pulled an elderly Indian lady had her sari stepped on as the devotees who enthusiastically pulled the ropes started out faster than the crowd inside the ropes and outside. She was pulling the rope but the crowd slid back as more devotees rushed to grab the rope and the next thing you know she fell just two feet in front of the wheel, about to be crushed by thousand of pounds.

I was standing where I had been told to a couple of feet to the front and side of the wheel with a stick in my hand and couldn’t get in front of the wheel, drop the stick and try to grab her out of the way all within one second or less, since the cart was almost upon her when she fell so I could only watch helplessly as the wheel rolled inches behind her legs, then she somehow or other rolled out of the way just in the nick of time. She had fallen feet first and head away from the cart, right in front of the wheel where the rope was lined up. I was in anxiety for the rest of the parade and wanted a better system.

At one Ratha Yatra I saw a piece of tape had been added to the ropes as a cut off point for the devotees to not stand in back of. But devotees inevitably do get pushed behind the tape. Still it was a good idea. So this year as I wandered around the cart looking for something to do before the parade started and I saw the empty wheel with no one guarding it. I thought I would try it again. No one was guarding it that I could see and Kirtiraja Prabhu, one of the board members told me to make sure no one gets by the wheel. I came up with some better ideas.

One is to take some brightly colored plastic ribbon, like red, and wind it around the rope for at least six to eight feet in front of the cart and if anyone touches the rope due to being pushed down they have to be told to get off the rope immediately. And no one should come up and touch the rope or even stand there in front of the wheel area to take pictures or offer flowers. The second thing is to start out with a padded stick of some sort to tap devotees and push them out of the way and if necessay this can be dropped to move baby carriages and mothers with children who ended up in the way, along with other men and women who were so caught up in the crowds they couldn’t get away from the wheels if they wanted to. And the third thing is to know when to push devotees out of the way before it is too late.

This happened to me one time at an especially dangerous moment yesterday. On the left of the cart was the water. On the right were beach bathers. Between them was the cart and the crowd of devotees. I was standing in front of the right front wheel not so close that it would hit me if there was a sudden lunge as the devotees pulled and the cart was turning right simultaneously, and at the same time making sure that no one came up behind the wheel or tried to get between the wheel and myself so they could squeeze past the crowd. Up ahead was a large sinkhole which I couldn’t see. The loudspeaker was in the cart and a kirtan was going very loudly if front of it so it was hard for someone to notice me yell. All of a sudden I noticed an elderly Indian gentleman with a cane in hand had his back to the wheel. I yelled for him to get out of the way two or three times but he only managed to turn around at the last second as others pointed to him what was happening. I had to shove him out of the way hoping he wouldn’t get hurt and only then did I see I had pushed him into the sinkhole. At least one other person went in at the same time, a younger caucasian woman. I didn’t have time to apologize to the woman, who might have been someone new and didn’t know what was happening, or the man, who I hoped did not get hurt, because I did not know what was going on up ahead and the cart was still rolling.

After this incident Kirtiraja Prabhu came up to me and said, “That was close!” so I felt I must have done the right thing. He said something about apologizing but I didn’t have time. He also said there should be someone even further up ahead to avoid this from happening, bottlenecks, I later called them, one time after we got held up by the lifeguard tower which was very close to the waves.

Also the women devotees seemed less responsive than the men when I told them to move. Maybe they weren’t expecting a man’s voice to tell them what to do they didn’t recognize or even when I tapped them on the shoulder they were unresponsive. The men were more responsive when you tapped them on the arm but the women didn’t turn to look back so they ended up getting pushed too a couple of times. I felt this looked very bad for me, that I was pushed at least two of the women.

There was a devotee woman guarding the wheel in back of me and a devotee told me once that in Puri they have two men with sticks or the same stick, I don’t remember, to guard each wheel. If there were lots of devotees to guard the wheels it would help to have a woman devotee to help get the matajis out of the way. I don’t mean to be blunt but as a guard I didn’t even have time to think about aplogizing until after the crisis was past, so if someone is absorbed in chanting and got too close to the wheel I didn’t have time to discriminate between who was who I just felt I had to protect them from the wheel. Even at one point the local GBC Sesa Prabhu was standing closer than I wanted him to to the wheel, pulling the rope. A sannyasi, Trivikrama Maharaja came just for a second to say haribol but stood so close to the wheel I instinctively said, “Maharaja you’re too close to the wheel!” and smashed into him with my shoulder. No he might not have been in danger of getting killed that second, but if he had fallen he would have been. There was no way I could have picked him up or rolled him out of the way in time if he had tripped. I felt bad offending him but he wasn’t the only devotee that day. I must have pushed a half a dozen devotees altogether. Most of this would have been avoided with a better system. I could intercept devotees before they approaced the taped off area of rope if it was obviously taped off. The reason devotees keep approaching the same place by the wheel is because they see the only opening at the rope there or by the cart and run up enthusiastically thinking they are safe.

No one would run two feet in front of a tire of a slowly moving dump truck with crowds of people all around and say “I’m not going to fall” espcially if it lurched forward from time to time and had crowds of people pushing back towards it from different directions, and tended to make major turning adjustments itself with even larger wheels than they have. When it came time for non devotees to walk by the cart some would try to get between the wheel and I, some were so drunk they were in a daze, some took a couple of seconds to realize they were by a huge wheel that could kill them, and later we had to roll between the yellow lines and the sidewalk to take up one lane of traffic. So at one point towards the end with all the people and narrow lanes I just started yelling “Big Wheel! Big Wheel!”. It might have made me look stupid but there was no one else ahead of me keeping everybody in order. Still I felt more confident this year than I did the first year I guarded the wheel.

I was determined to figure out a better system for guarding the wheel I now I think I have. A bright orange vest, matching tape for the ropes, a matching taped foam padded stick and extra people with more training would make the next Ratha Yatra even better. I am sending this email to dandavats. com and the Festival of India, which I traveled with one summer, and I hope if it is good advice devotees will use it at the upcoming Ratha Yatras. Because nobody else stopped the cart yesterday when the old man was gong to be hit, if he was, and no one else got him out of the way. Maybe he would have saved himself at the last second too like the old lady, but why have guards at all if we are just letting people get knocked down to the ground in front of the wheels and depending on Krishna to save them?

One more thing about the rope is there could be a limit on how many people can go on. Also the ropes yesterday would be rubbed into and ground when the big wheels of the cart made large right hand turns on my side of the ropes, and left hand turns on the other side. If the ropes were mounted off to the sides a couple of feet so that they were equal to the turning radius of the wheels there would be less chance for devotees to be straight in line with the wheels and more room between the ropes, but the mounts might have to be made so that they could be retracted going down a narrow street or for storage.

Adi Kavi Das

ISKCON Alachua