whats that indescribable word

I just happened to get caught in the frenzied melee of the Ganpati immersions at Tilaknagar on Thursday. The regal and benevolent all at once Ganpati of the Sahyadri Mandal was making its way through the suburb on its way to immersion.
I fended off the gulaal, took a few blows on the sides of the stomach from people dancing to steps that are part of no known dance routine in the world, and had my ears paining from the not-in-sync rhythms of three different brass bands.

I wanted to reach home quickly- just a few yards away- thinking that I hadn’t shut the tap leading to the overhead tank. And no way did I want to be welcomed by a tiny room filled with waist high water. But as I said once you get caught in this melee, you just give in. An unstoppable force that will crush all in its path.
In most languages there is no word for it. English for long has been a soaking sponge for words from the disparate languages of the nations the British once occupied. Pandit, jehad, yog, guru, coffle, jungle, and the like.
The feeling of the hair on your hands standing at its ends as the dong and the dhols reach a crescendo, the sheer force by which this unending mass of nearly a lakh people move inch by inch on a 60 feet road, is one that is indescribable.
And since we have gone through this feeling for several hundred years now in a small town called Puri in Orissa, we decided to be a bit charitable about it.
So to the massive ocean of English words, we added a drop to fill up what was otherwise a dry spot for the language.
We gave them the word ‘juggernaut’.
A term that the dictionary puts down as ‘ an unstoppable force that will crush all in its path; usually created by a group of people working together’.
It comes from the frenzy that is created when lakhs of Oriyas- now from people across the world- come together to pull the massive sky-high chariots of Lord Jaggannath, Subhadra and Balaram across the streets of smalltown Puri.
Juggernaut, Jaggannath, that’s the connection.
And for someone like me, who firmly believes that all public festivals should be banned, the pagan air that the immersion procession had at Tilaknagar was something I liked.
Maybe if we just let go of some rituals and concentrate on the pagan-bit in the only organised religion in the world that has it, I think we will enjoy our lives better.