Eminent lawyer and politician, Oba Mekunu Owolabi Salis, has felicitated with the Indian Prime Minister Narenda Mordi, the President, Droupaoi Murmu, and the Hindus on the on-going celebration of Maha Kumbh Mela in India.
The foremost Hindu religious festival eminently rated as a converging beehive of concentration of the greatest numbers of pilgrims and pious religious devotees all over the world, expectedly featured close to a staggering turn-out of 400 million pilgrims within the duration of the epoch making fiesta.
Speaking on the festival, Owolabi Salis said: “Particularly exciting in all these,is the fact that this year’s edition of the festival happens only once in a cycle of 144 years,due to a rare planetary alignment of the Sun, Mercury and Jupiter.
“This is to say that the last time we had a special version of the festival,as the currently celebrated one,based on the auspicious planetary alignment,was 144 years ago,just as we wouldn’t be having another extraordinary celebration like this, until the next 144 years to come.
“Hence, I consider myself so lucky to observe this unforgettable moment of celebration of this great Hindu religion which arguably rates as the oldest religion in the world.”
He stated further, “I can say with all sense of pride that I am a living first-hand witness to it all, being among the massive number of pilgrims, who made it a duty to turn up for this memorable occasion, during which the ancient and exotic city of Prayagraj was emersed in a remarkable wave of spirituality, featuring evocative torrents of intense prayers, chants, spiritual baths, among several other powerful rites.”
The notable globe-trotter who blazed the trail as the first Black African to travel both to the North and South Pole described his experience during the historic observation of the pilgrimage not only as enriching and rewarding but also great and marvelous.
“It was indeed a spiritually uplifting experience, emotionally esctatic, refreshing and exciting, from what I could see, I cannot but describe this grand festival as a dynamic interaction of culture and religion at its best, converging towards an immense utilitarian benefit for mankind,” he said.
Salis, the Spiritual Leader of Soul Makers Ministry Worldwide, commended the Hindus particularly the Indian race, for their salutary wisdom in adhering to the religion rooted in the existential reality of their unique cultural experience and simply refusing to kotow to the tyranny of foreign culture and religion infiltrating to erode the originality of their Indigenous religion and culture.
He defined this as offering a huge lesson for Africans and the blacks who, out of a deeply ingrained sense of inferiority, tends to extrapolate foreign religion and culture and foist it on their own peculiar environment.
According to him, “All human beings have a primary spirit in them. Most human beings have secondary spirits in them. The Primary Spirit is the Maker and Owner of all souls; the one that gave the soul to live, which is your first root to life.”