Exhausted....

Yaaawn!! I'm back to my dusty, chilly, traffic clogged bangalore. Feels like i'm back to heaven--back to where I belong.

We were 12 friends on the road, roaming inside the belly of maha rashtra for four days. This wasn't a trip or a fun tour in the strictest sense---as i mentioned earlier, we were attending an award function in Pune where my master was felicitated. And then there was another function in Mumbai, three days later which we had to attend. In the interim, we roamed quite a lot and broke our backs. The exhaustion is still present in my muscles, and will probably remain for some more days.

The good thing about this vacation was that we discovered a new sense of bonding amongst us. One of our friends brought out his capacity for management by overseeing the entire trip, arranging taxis and hotel rooms at 5 in the morning, booking air-train tickets in advance, co-ordinating with various people over the phone and making sure that we had a whale of a time with the least inconvinience. We discovered the maturity and depth of experience of another friend who would normally remain silent. And in a tough situation, we found out the fighters hidden inside two of our friends.

Ajantha--Ellora caves are nothing less than man-made wonders. These were constructed over a period of 5 generations, amidst dense forests and inhospitable terrain. The excellence,vision and dedication of those artists and rulers who made this possible are truely awe-inspiring. Equally admirable is the cleanliness and order maintained by the archealogical survey of india, which manages these places. And as with any tourist places, one has to put up with the constant pestering of hawkers and vendors, who don't give a damn to art-architecture-heritage, and are only bothered about selling their wares and make a living.

The ugly part of this tour stared us in the face when we had to board a train from aurangabad to Mumbai on saturday night. When the train stopped at the station, the entire compartment was crowded with villagers, who were going to Nasik to attend a political rally on sunday. All our reserved seats were occupied by pan-chewing, smoking, foul mouthed thugs who probably never bought a train ticket all their lives, and probably will never do so. Twelve of us with heavy luggage inside a train compartment--and no place to even stand properly, that too after a back breaking day at ajantha caves!

All the other passengers who had reserved their seats were standing while these goons were resting on the seats, joking, playing cards, swearing, shouting slogans every 10 minutes. Probably we'd have also stood like them but some of us just barged in and started speaking their language. It was a struggle for nearly 15 minutes during which two of our friends were screaming at the top of their lungs at these villagers, one guy just got into a fist fight, some of us pulled him and others back, trying to pacify them and the angry thugs, and the rest just shivered and prayed. At the end of all the drama, we managed to snatch back 6 of our 12 seats, dumped in all our luggage and sat huddled in the cold night on these seats until the train reached nasik and the villagers drained out. Whew...quite unforgettable!

We had the fortune of visiting the ancient house of one of the most renowned saints of 16th century---Sant Eknath. His descendants still live in his house and we chatted with them as they spoke about their famous ancestor. When all of us sat in meditation in the room which Eknath had built himself centuries ago, we felt as if we were transported back by 400 years. The faint sounds of the evening, the barking dogs, the crying children all belonged to that era, not to the fastpaced 21st century. Probably we might've been actually taken back to the past--in some silent moments, we were one with the great master who'd brought light to medieval india and continues to do so even today.

The best moment of this trip came when we sat on the banks of river Godavari, dangling our legs in the cool waters, watching the golden orange sun sink into the vast expanse at a distance. The tremendous silence of that atmosphere will probably remain etched in my being till the end.