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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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Memorial to a loved Pet

I was wandering with Samhith around Gulab Bagh, the huge garden where the Udaipur Zoo is located. We had time to kill before we could catch the bus which would take us back to Mumbai, we had checked out of our room, and Shankar had already flown back the day before. Having so much time on our hands, but hesitant to wander into lonely places, we tried to stick to the well marked paths, at the same time trying to avoid the crowds thronging the park. Following a butterfly, we moved away from the well trodden path, and suddenly, right in front of us was a marble edifice. Curious, we moved closer, and both of us were stunned!



It seemed to be a tomb, but what was surprising was that it was the tomb of a dog - surely must have been a loved pet to merit such a beautiful marble tomb in the middle of a garden! I wondered who built the tomb, and when, but there was nothing marked on it, and no one there had any idea. 


Have any of you seen this? Do you have anything to add? If so, please leave a comment, and I will update this blog.
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