A 55-feet tall ‘tazia’ tower keeled over and collapsed during a Muharram procession in Bhopal in India on October 2. <br /><br />Tazia is a representation of the tomb of Imam Hussain, grandson of Prophet Mohammad. <br /><br />During Muharram, Muslims take out tazia towers in procession to mourn the martyrdom of Imam Husain and 72 others in the battle of Karbala.<br /><br />The procession at Bhopal was a disaster-in-the-making from the word go. <br /><br />The tazia tower was too tall and was teetering under its own weight. <br /><br />The organisers, who were trying to keep it upright by balancing it from different directions with the help of long ropes, realised that they were battling a lost cause. <br /><br />Devotees, who were pulling the tazia through the narrow lanes, raised an alarm as it began to tilt. Sensing that it was about to fall they started running for their safety.<br /><br />Their fears came true as the towering structure fell over a building and broke into pieces. <br /><br />Syed Jaffer Hussain of Hyderabad-based Shia Companions Wakf Protection Front said no one was hurt as the building took the brunt of the fall. <br /><br />He said the structure had not been built well. “Due to rains the organisers had been left with very little time to work on it,” he added.<br /><br />Jaffer said in Hyderabad and many other places the height of tazias averaged at six or seven feet. <br /><br />But in parts of India different regions compete to build the tallest tazia of the year, sometime raising their height to even 100 feet.
