maheshwar...part 1.......

im back from a two week trip to maheshwar...

temples, a fort, a river, a waterfall, a handful of children who say "hello" every 10 meters, a cluster of families who are into weaving, generations together...and boat rides almost every day....

peculiar how the only thing that bothered me during the whole of two weeks is that i dint find any butter in some 150 shops in and around maheshwar.....as if amul has boycotted the town from the utterly delicious taste.....

hmmm....so maybe i should get down to the experience....

maheshwar...

a quaint little town in the south western part of madhya pradesh...

about a 2 and a half hour journey from indore where we reached after a 12 hour train ride from delhi

Once you are out of the frenzy of indore ....you suddenly realise that the table tops of our school textbooks (which we named 'plateaus'...) are really very cute....there is no other word for it......its cute...they arent immense...they arent scary....they are made as if god wanted to please children by showing them something that they could climb.....

in reality they are huge....but well from a distance they are achievable heights.....

that is when one realises that here starts the one experience that you can never forget...one which you wont want to forget either.....just the meandering road and the li'l small tea stalls made me realised...the holiday starts here....

we stayed in a mp govt hotel called the "narmada retreat" retreat or not....it was a treat.....situated right on the banks of narmada. The steps leading down to the immense river itself. (alright i admit...it was fucking costly for me, but well who would not want to pay the price for such bounty)

the minute we came back...the first thing was to arrange all the things.....the other people just slept off...i instead lit up a smoke and went to the bank...watching a lone temple right in the middle of the river.....the little water plants standing around as if guarding it....

on my left was the fort(i.e. to the east) and to my right was ...well, just green...the banks running with the river......to eternity it seems

throughout my school life i learnt that narmada flows from east to west and finally gets lost in the arabian sea.....here i was proved wrong....here was the river flowing exactly in the opposite direction....atleast it pretended to.....

the fact is that our school books are right......its just that the breeze is so strong that the waves are always in the opposite direction of the flow.....

so it seems that way,,....

ahem, a friend came over....and i snapped out of my reverie......walked along the steep, thorny banks to the fort and temple and then took a boat back.....quite an adventure,....the temple looks v ery old but does not have these wierd pandits ru8nning to you for some puja or some business transaction to god......you can sit on the temple stairs for hours....listening to the boat wallahs and the other people who are jostling about constantly.....maybe on some odd evening you might find a young couple sitting in some corner of the stairs....scared ...but in love.

maheshwar's main god is shiva......and interestingly there are soo maany lingam's all through the bank....each temple is dedicated to the god of destroyal.....

considering that the post is gonna be way too long and well im short of time....will be back with more....so far so good.