San Antonio College Library

Filmed in Allahabad, this captivating program captures the 2001 Maha Kumbh festival, a 43-day event that drew tens of millions of devotees to the confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna, and mythic Saraswati Rivers to honor the creation story of Hinduism and to pray for release from the cycle of reincarnation. The program provides a kaleidoscopic view of the pageants, rituals, and ceremonies that make up the festival, as well as the sadhus and sadhvis, pandits,...

Confluence is a man-made world, half fertile river valley, half crater strewn desert. It is a world at the end of its time, a place of savagery, bureaucracy and war, inhabited by countless flying micromachines and then thousand bloodlines ruled by devotion to absent gods. It is also the home of Yama, who was found as an infant floating down the river and raised by the prelate of Aeolis. Yama is the last remaining scion of The Builders, and now, awed...

This text argues that the media have reduced the world to a collective voyeur passively watching, monitoring, and observing crimes against humanity in former Yugoslavia. The Balkan war has produced the Balkanization of the West with the Western powers seemingly paralyzed by internecine warfare.