Before I started my internship, I knew that interesting work and hanging out with cool people wouldn't suffice for my coming to work in India - I wanted to do some weekend travels around Bangalore. There were lots of cool interns in the office but we mostly hung out by drinking Kingfisher and watching Big Bang Theory. Nobody seemed to have the energy to get out of Bangalore for a weekend. So after a month and a half or so of trying to organize people together to go somewhere, I decided to just start my weekend travels alone. I did one trip to the Belur and Halebid temples, and then another trip to the same Karnataka region, going through mysore briefly on the way to the magnificient Jain holy town of Sravanabelagola.
It took me 15 times of rereading my little note saying 'sravanabelagola' whenever I wanted to get directions to the correct bus, till I finally memorized the name of the darned place and was able to roll it off my tongue smoothly. Now I can proudly say that my Sravanabelagola-saying skill is nothing to sneer at.
At Sravanabelagola, I woke up with the sun to walk barefoot up stone-hewn steps leading up to this naked meditating monolith:
I love Jainism!
View from the way up:
Ancient pillars at the top of the hill:
There was a marriage procession when I got down from the hill, probably for the same marriage at the pilgrims' halls which I later 'crashed' (with an impromptu invitation):
From earlier that weekend, here are some photos from Mysore. I was able to take this one at the bazaar as an action shot only because the pretty girl with whom I traveled that afternoon captured the shopkeepers' full attention.
I didn't even see any Hindu temples at Mysore - but the Mosque was pretty from the outside, and the cathedral contained Jesus (presumably after being taken down from the cross).
