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2023 - The Year That Was

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
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Parakeets and Kites at the Qutub Complex

They once were haunts of the rulers of India - from the ancient and now almost forgotten Hindu rulers of the place now called Delhi to the Mughals who left their indelible mark on the capital of India -  the ruins around the Qutub Minar have plenty of stories to tell. Instead of the royals who once walked among the lanes, today there are tourists who rush past, stopping just for a photograph or two to commemorate their visit to the place which was built to remind a city of the greatness of its ruler. The only inhabitants of this place today are these birds, which are free to fly wherever they please.
No restrictions stop them from approaching the tower and entering it through one of its windows.... they move happily between the modern buildings just outside the complex to the ruins of centuries old structures... at home in either place.... Here are a couple of birds I photographed at the Qutub Complex....





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