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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

Achalgarh - of a Fort and Temple, Bulls and Demons....

A bull which drove away invaders, three buffaloes said to be demons, a lake once said to have been filled with ghee and a temple once covered in lime to protect it – we couldn’t help but smile as we listened to these stories about Achalgarh. We had a day free at Mount Abu and were in the mood to explore, so we headed out for the tourist circuit, trusting our driver to take us to some interesting places. 



Achalgarh turned out to be the first on his list, and as we headed along roads with farms interspersed between the mountains, with scarcely a person to be seen anywhere, I wondered about the place we were going to. I had heard a bit about Achalgarh before we started, and knew that it had once been the capital of the area. The name indicated the presence of a fort, but our driver told me that there was no fort there. “Bas, mandir hai, Madam” he said. ”There is only a temple there.” I felt my enthusiasm droop at the idea of visiting yet another temple, but we had already turned on the road to Achalgarh, so there was no turning back.

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Comments

  1. interesting..  we had gone to mount abu too but i think i forgot about this temple.  i loved mount abu trip

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  2. Interesting place.

    www.rajniranjandas.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  3. Nice temple...............................http://www.giftwithlove.com

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yes, it was, Niranjan! surprisingly interesting :D

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks Meena! Its a beautiful place, but isnt well promoted, so easy to forget!

    ReplyDelete
  6. You have a great sense of writing I must say. Your post has those facts which are not accessible from anywhere else. I request you humbly please keep writing such remarkable articles.

    ReplyDelete

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