Heavy metal holy man is crowd-puller

If gold had legs, it would probably look a lot like Google Golden Baba

- Biswajeet Banerjee

At the Magh Mela, where renunciation usually arrives wrapped in ash, silence and the occasional woollen shawl, salvation has this year turned up dripping in gold, clinking in silver and posing obligingly for selfies. Enter Manoj Anand Maharaj, also known as Manoj Sengar, a resident of Kakadeo in Kanpur.

Better known to the faithful, the locals, the merely curious and the relentlessly Instagram-minded as Google Golden Baba, he steps out each day draped in an eye-watering 4kg of gold. Chains, pendants, rings and bangles cling to him so densely that he appears less like a person and more like a mobile bullion counter.

Sengar insists there is nothing calculated about his glittering appearance. He claims he has never bothered to weigh the gold he wears. According to him, it is simply “God's wish” that he should be adorned this way.

The sight is impossible to miss. Wherever he goes, heads turn, phones rise and whispers ripple through the crowd. In a city not short of colour or characters, he has managed to stand apart purely by the sheer weight of precious metal on his body.