Holy Water for Pilgrims

Take a look at @nytimes’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/768904807402901504?s=09

Every summer, hundreds of thousands of Indians, barefoot and draped in orange clothing, make a 100-mile pilgrimage on foot to fetch water from the sacred Ganges River that they then offer at their local temples to Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.

This year, they have a less arduous option: The postal service is using its 155,000 offices across India to deliver holy water from the Ganges — for far less than $1 a bottle. As one postal official put it, “If Muhammad cannot go to the mountain, the mountain comes to him.”

Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s union minister of communication and information technology, led the initiative. “If the postman can deliver mobile phones, saris, jewelry and apparel, then why not Ganga water?” heasked in announcing it last month, using the Hindu name for the river.

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