India Trip - Experience/Travel Log - 2

Since I named one of the previous blogs as "India Travel?experience part-1", I am compelled to continue and put out a part-2 for the post. This one I will cover the south India travel and in the next/last part I will cover North India travel.

• Climbed up the stairs of Chamundi hills in Mysore, It was a fun experience. There is a spot about 2/3rds of the way up where we drank some fresh sugar cane juice. The interesting part I noticed was that some of the stone steps were either getting a make over or getting replaced, I was glad to see the economic progress was not just restricted to "volvo" buses.

• Payed a visit to Krishna Raja Sagara dam, a dam built across river Kaveri. Built in a932 by the legendary Sir M Vishweshwaraiah, I would consider it an Engineering feat even by today's standards. The entrance to the dam has changed over time and the new visitors won't even get a glimpse of the dam but are escorted straight to the brindavan gardens. The gardens has a bunch of fountains which get illuminated in the night. My observation, the number of fountains hasn't changed at all and are pretty much the same, they don't seem to have changed in the last 20 years but the number of people visiting the park has definitely gone up 100 fold.

• We made a road trip to Dharmasthala and Kukke Subramanya, both are piligrim places located in Dakshina Kannada district. The road is through Hassan and the road is amazingly well built till Hassan, but after that it is well built in patches.

• Dharmasthala is a wonderful place for couple of reasons. It is one of those pilgrim places which we visit on a decently regular basis. The number of people visiting the place is phenomenal. Even more phenomenal is the fact that the temple provides free lunch and dinner every day of the year. The sheer logistics involved in feeding so many people (some say average 5000 a day visit the place) is mind boggling.

• Another very important reason is the diversity of the place. The primary god is shiva who is mostly worshiped by Lingayat community, the people who perform the pooja belong to brahmin community and the executive management is handled by Dr. Veerendra Heggade who happens to be a jain. I wondered if Jerusalem could learn something from here.

• Kukke Subramanya is about 60kms from Dharmastala and it is a smaller temple. When we reached the temple they had some pooja going on and people sat through the end of the pooja without any noise, but the moment pooja closed and prasad distribution started, the same set of people rushed so hard that it made me wonder are these the same set of people who a moment ago were so gentle and nice? It wasn't like the prasad was limited, the temple authorities repeatedly were announcing that everybody will get the prasad, I guess it was all falling on deaf ears.

• On the way to these places we stopped at Anuganalu (near Hassan), where folks from BCRT have transformed a barren rocky hillock to a green forest. A good place to stop and have a look for all green lovers and conservation enthusiasts.

• One last thing I observed on this trip was that the people of Hassan, unlike that of Mysore and Bangalore are still breeding Indian breed of cattle. As a conservation enthusiast I was very happy, there is still hope for the Indian cattle.