Hundreds of thousands of devotees flocked to temples in Northern India to see the Hindu deities drinking milk. The drinking god craze comes just two days after thousands of Muslims piled up at a bay in Bombay to drink the sea water that had turned sweet.

"It is a miracle," Sudhir Mishra, a priest at a Shiva temple in Lucknow told the AP. He said that at least 10 liters of milk had been offered at his temple on Monday.

"Look at the floor it is fairly dry. Where's the milk gone? It should be visible on floor. Can you see that?"

However, scientists say the milk was disappearing from the spoons of the devotees not due to the slurping by the idols, rather because it was caused by surface tension, a force that pulls the liquid toward the statues, and capillary action, through which the milk is leached into the statues by tiny pores on the surface of the stone.

"Milk disappears the same way water reaches the top of a tree through roots," A. K. Sharma, a professor at Lucknow University told the AP.

A similar episode occurred some eleven years ago. At that time, authorities were forced to deploy extra police to control crowds and some parts of the country even faced a milk shortage.

Earlier on Friday, so-called miracle that turned seawater sweet in Mumbai's Mahim Creek attracted thousands of devotees at the bay.

Despite the appeal by scientists and authorities to not to drink the water which they said had dropped levels of salt due to heavy rains, crowds kept on filling their mouth and bottles with the miracle water.

Sociologists say that the frenzy over the latest incidents indicates the sharp contrasts in education among India's billion-plus people.