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Showing posts from August, 2021

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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

Ladakh - Planning The Trip

Over 2000 Km by road, in around 10 days. Stunning landscapes, wonderful people. That sums up our Ladakh trip. But how did it actually work? How did we make it happen? Read on to find out!  Leh, the capital of Ladakh , is accessible by air and road. Flying into Leh is the easiest, and time-saving option, while the road is the time consuming one, but with the added advantage of driving past some of the most beautiful landscapes in our country. Each option has much to recommend it, and we chose the road for just one reason – altitude sickness. Altitude sickness was one of my biggest concerns, since I suffer from motion-sickness. Yes, I do travel a lot, but that is despite my condition, and, over the years, have learnt how to handle it. I struggled with it when we visited Nathu-La in Sikkim, and wondered if I would be able to manage a week at the even higher altitudes that we would encounter in Ladakh. This was the reason we stuck to a basic plan, of only 9 days in Ladakh, though we

Ladakh Part 10: The Last Stretch - Mulbek to Srinagar

The spectacular landscapes of Ladakh continued to astound us as we continued on our way past Lamayuru.  Somewhere along the route, the Wakha river joined us, and along her canyon were stunning natural rock formations, which reminded me of the ancient temples of central India. This continued all the way to Mulbek , where we stopped to see the colossal Maitreya Buddha carved into the rock. We had seen many colossal statues of Maitreya in Ladakh. But this one is different. Those are made of clay and stucco. This one is carved into the rock, and is dated to the 9 th century CE. It is considered one of the finest such figures seen in the region.  The figure of Maitreya is carved on a huge boulder, standing in the middle of the village, right by the side of the road. He is shown with 4 hands, and richly adorned, holding a lotus stalk and rosary in his upper hands, the lower hands in varada mudra, and holding a kamandalu. There has been a lot of speculation regarding his identity, but t