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
Our train dropped us , early in the morning, at the rain washed station of Mayiladudurai. The rains were unexpected, and we had no umbrellas. We rushed for cover within the station premises, and leaving my son to take care of our luggage, I hurried to find a car to take us to our destination. The drivers outside were huddling inside their vehicles, reluctant to step out. Eventually, one of them agreed, and we made our way through the wet streets of the city to the small fishing village that was our destination – Tharangambadi, on the Tamilnadu coast.