Indian heritage

India is so rich in art & culture – I sometimes feel this invaluable heritage is taken for granted and ignored… or sometimes people get into endless debates about trying to define exactly what it is! But once in a way its nice to be reminded of it… for example in the following entry by H.P. [click on the following image to view the complete entry]

This makes me nostalgic of the times I used to visit ancient temples all over the south of India with our family including my thatha (grandpa) – we two used to take time every now and then to pause and appreciate the intricacies of the artwork as well as the story behind it. He was like my own personal tourist guide 🙂 Though I’ve been religious only to a very limited extent, the ambience in these ancient temples was definitely special.

But speaking of tourist guides – they hang around outside the temple to see if they can pick up a group. Some just conduct a tour very mechanically as “yet another trip”. But some are very sincere guides, so passionate about it that they really love to convey the beauty of the place to the visitor in a very creative animated way! I think its a nice thing to use their services, since apart from learning something of historical interest, they also can surprise one with interesting stories and a good sense of humor – especially when visitors show interest and asks questions and the whole thing starts becoming really interactive. And of course it provides them employment as well – its definitely a mutually benfeficial thing!

Dharmasthala
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However there are some more temples that are more serene than others, where one is better of just being there – and I mean truly, simply, *being*. Merely merge with the crowd or stand calmly in some solitary place, doing nothing, simply experiencing the traquility. And one such place I’ve been to is DharmasthaLa. Here I didn’t really care that much about the elephants nor the architecture nor the priests chanting some mantras nor the crowd that waited in a queue to have a darshan of the diety inside… can’t really place my finger on it, but there was something heavenly about the place – it seemed to have some kind of an inexplicably powerful ambience. Now that I recall it – at some point in the interior – there was suddenly and unexpectedly the most beautiful moment – the ringing of the bells and the darkness and the golden glow of the lamps seemed to, for a few moments, make time stand still.

Like everything else even that was temporary, and after some days of wondering what had happened even after returning to Bangalore, I eventually almost forgot about it.

We’ve visited the place several times, and I remember one particularly ardous journey while travelling there during my childhood days. It was an overnight journey, through the winding steep roads of the Wester Ghats – having bottomless cliffs and sheer rock faces on the sides. And that’s when our car – an ambassador crammed with people – had to lose its headlights. My uncle was driving, and we decided we couldn’t possibly stop there in the dark in the middle of nowhere, we had to carry on. We decided to go all the way. We started off very slowly and cautiously but it turned out to be far trickier than we anticipated. Now I find this incredible – but eventually my cousin sister and myself had to hold flashlights out of the car window! Every single person in the car was kind of terrified – and every person in the car was watching out and yelling instructions on behalf of the driver. (Talk about back seat driving – this was the height of it!) At some points it looked almost like certain death – several times we came far too close to the edge of the cliff or just missed the rock face on the other side. It was really *nothing short of a miracle* that we finally made it! We, well me atleast – had a really good sleep for the rest of the night. 🙂

They also serve very nice food as charity for the thousands of visitors – the efficiency with which the service is made for such a massive scale is simply amazing – yet as long as one only eats (with no chatting, dreaming, etc) one does not feel hurried and there’s sufficient time to eat comfortably – even if you’re a slow eater like me 😉