Places impact you for a variety of reasons. And the same place impacts different people in different ways. This is especially true when it comes to spiritual experiences, where every single person’s experience is unique. And personally, every spiritual experience is unique, the same person can have different deeply spiritual experiences at different places, at different times. This thought has emerged because of my own experiences over the years, but especially so this year, with different and unique experiences at various places I have visited recently. I began this year with a visit to Baroda (Vadodara) with friends. It was meant to be a relaxed trip, a touristy trip, with our sons. We enjoyed ourselves to the hilt, but the highlight of that trip was a visit to the Lakulisha temple at Pavagadh. It was the iconography of the temple that I connected with, and I spent a few hours simply lost in the details of the figures carved around the temple. There was an indefinable connect with
We happened to see this vehicle, probably one of the new ones belonging to the police or the army. It drew all eyes towards it, and cameras and mobiles were pulled out, and the tourists went click....click....click! I wondered if it would be all right to take pics, considering that these belong to our state security forces, but there were plenty of policemen around, and none of them seemed to care about the photography, so I decided to go for it too! It looks more like a tank than a van, right? I saw a couple more such vehicles at Mantralaya later, but did not dare take pics there!!!!!