Hyderabad: What should have been a spiritually enriching experience at the Kumbh Mela turned into a harrowing ordeal for 55-year-old G Satyanarayana Murthy from Hyderabad. Amid the chaos of a deadly stampede on Wednesday, Murthy found himself not just a witness to the chaos but emerged as a hero: He saved two women who had been trampled by the crowd, risking his own safety to pull them out from beneath the surge of pilgrims.
Speaking from Prayagraj over phone to TOI, Murthy recalled how it took his group a gruelling eight hours to cover just a kilometre-long stretch from the Shahi Snan to their tents, a journey that should have taken only a few minutes.
“There was an equal number of people heading towards the Shahi Snan and those returning, causing stampedes in several places,” he explained. “People couldn’t move. It took us more than five hours to reach the Snan, and that’s when the chaos hit. Barricades had fallen, and people were tripping over each other. We could barely keep track of what was happening.”
In the midst of the madness, Murthy’s group saw two women lying on the ground, helpless as others unknowingly walked over them. “We had to stop the crowd from trampling them. Four others joined us to help bring the women to safety,” he said. Murthy’s voice trembled as he recounted the horror of seeing bodies on his return journey—one left unattended for a long time. “It was horrifying,” he said.
The ordeal didn’t end there. The return journey took more than two hours, making the total time to cover 1 km eight hours. “Rumours and panic spread, and there were so many children and elderly people in the crowd. It was troubling,” he said.
Murthy, a graphic designer, plans to return home on Thursday.
Yaddanapudi Subramanyam, another member of a Telugu devotees’ group, said, “We were also supposed to go (for the dip), but we stayed back when the seer accompanying us warned us not to venture in the chaos.”
