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
Kitchen gardens were something I had only read about in books! Then I heard of Urban Leaves , and visited their city farm on a water tank in the Maharashtra Nature Park, and was hooked! More than me, it was Samhith, who, I must say, was fascinated by the idea of eating vegetables plucked directly from the garden, once he realized how much tastier they were than the market bought ones! A few months back, I hadn’t even thought of having my own kitchen garden, much less heard of something called “World Kitchen Garden Day”. When Preeti first told me about it, I simply relegated it to some corner at the back of my mind, a reminder that there was something on the 28 th of August, which I had to attend (if possible). A couple of months and a few visits to terrace farms in the city managed by the enthusiastic volunteers was enough to get me more excited about the event!