“Spur of the moment” is the current mantra and the Trip to Shravanabelagola will go down as one of those.
The initial plan was that Theju, Sidharth, Prasad, Pramod, Musavir, Varma and I will travel to SB in Sid’s Alto and a Santro. The planned time was leave 3 am, Reach there 5:30 am, Make way to top and spend most of the day on top of the hill and return by 9 pm.
What happened was totally different…
Varma first dropped out a few days ago(me had to pick up a friend arriving in the city), Musavir also had to back away from the plans, Pramod was still indecisive about making the trip. The day before the trip Theju, Prasad, Pramod, Sid and I spent the night in the office planning to leave at dawn… thats when we were infomed that we need a pass to view the abhisheka… (We had none :) ). We enquired and found that the general dharshan was at 3 in the evening and Planned to atleast make it to that.
Sid decided he wont be coming oweing to his train to Cochin at 10pm. Pramod said that he would make it as he was spending the night at office and would get his next days work done. I planned to get back home early morning, get some decent sleep and rush back to go to SB. Theju and Prasad were doing the same.
The crunch time came in the morning and we realized that only Theju, Prasad and I were going and talks of driving there in bikes came up. I was not totally for it considering my recent fight with cinus(want to avoid cold air as much as I can now… atleast for sometime). We decided to take Sid’s Alto… Suddenly the girls decided to join in… Shruthi, Preethi and Vidhya joined in and the 6 of us set rolling.
The drive was amazing… Roads beautifully flat… the best trip wrt roads I have taken in a long time. Theju did most of the driving, Preethi and I did a short stint in between. It was a pleasure driving on that road :), it truly made driving a pleasure :)
We arrived at Shravanabelagola by 4:30 and spent sometime trying to find the parking space. The whole town had transformed for the Mahamastakabisheka, there were hotels and cops all over the place… It looked really well organized.
The climb to the top took us 50 min(I actually used a stop watch to time it :P)… we would hv taken a fifth of the time if they did not stop the queue every 20 steps :P… understandably it was to make sure no stampeding occured.
The number of doorways to the enterance absolutely surprized me, its my second trip to SB and the last one happened 12 years ago(looks like im destined to view the Gomateswara after ever Mahamastakabisheka). The last time I remember the steps and all but the number of doorways were just 2… well guess my memories will now be updated :)
The architecture all around was spectacular. I remember an intresting quote by my uncle a few days ago
“Like the best of our generation have been put into IT (debatable), the best of the earlier generations were put to Architecture”
I truly agree :)
The pictures speak a million words and I will let them do the talking… The Gomateswara is incredibly beautiful and once you are in front of it you just go speechless. For people who dont know this is the tallest monlithic statue in the world.
For some reason I feel an unusual bond with Shravanabelagola and the Mahamastakabisheka in the 2 times in my lifetime its happened I have seen the monolith around the same time. When I was watching the Mahamastakabisheka on the first day, I acutally sat watching it for an hour and if it wasnt for the wedding I would have seen it all day(It may sound wierd but it made me feel spirutual)… Will write about this later :P
We were done a few mins after reaching the top. We stopped for some masala lime soda and Cucumber(my favourites) at the bottom of the hill before heading to the car and back home. We reached home at 9:30 pm tired and really sleepy :)
Websites for info on Mahamastakabisheka Mahotsav:
http://www.shravanabelagola.com/
http://www.mahamastakabisheka.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shravanabelagola
http://www.karnataka.com/tourism/shravanabelagola/
Check out Theju’s Photos here
Stills from the trip :)….
The columns are the best part of Indian Architecture… Its amazing that Indian kings tooks so much intrest in how the holy buildings looked…
The size of the monolith can be seen above wrt to humans… Its spectacular well done… the body is very smooth other wise it would retain parts of the abhisheka material on it(the kalash just flows off the skin)… marvellous.
The ratio of size of head to hands to feet is amazingly accurate… wonder how the architect did it… I struggle when i sketch simple images on paper… guess its talent
It looks like a lot of polluting but almost everything in the abhisheka is biodegradable so like the Jain way “Live and Let live”.
Its sad to see vandals decerate holy monuments… saw similar stuff at the Taj… Its really disgusting (above left snap)
Lake on the way back…