31 March 2014, 02:08 PM IST
It's been an interesting week for walking. On the sunny Sunday morning gone by, too close to sunrise for my liking but there really wasn't much of a choice, a motley group of people gathered at Mysore Bank Circle in Bangalore. For those unfamiliar with the city's topography, it's a landmark like few others. It marks the beginning of Avenue Road, a road like few others in this city. But more of that later.
There we were, coming in ones and twos, and marking our attendance to the Intach guide for the day. For, this was a Parichay, one of Intach's programmes to give people a deeper insight into various historical delights of the city through walks. Latha, our guide for the day, welcomed us briskly and once the entire contingent of about a baker's dozen had assembled and after a brief round of introductions, led us to the temple next door.
That was the beginning of a whirlwind tour of several temples on and off Avenue Road. We walked from one to another, with Latha leading the way and pausing to let the laggards, which included me trying to fend off waves of sleep, catch up. She's an Indologist with an academic's passion for history that comes across in the erudite description of temples, deities, and local lore.
I quickly lost count of the number of temples we visited, and all I knew that the interiors of the temples provided cool relief from the blazing sun outside. And everywhere, the priest blessed us so, by the end of the tour, we had accumulated enough divine protection against anything the world would throw at us.
But there was no protection from the stench from the rotting piles of garbage at virtually every intersection of this amazing maze of interlocking lanes and bylanes. The BBMP compactor trucks and crews tried to clear away the mounds of festering food and garbage but they were fighting a losing battle. Surprisingly, the residents of the neighbourhood (many of them quite wealthy going by the cars which slid by in slow motion thanks to the jampacked traffic on narrow roads) seemed to have come to terms with their spotlessly clean houses and disturbingly dirty neighbourhood.
Participatory civic action sounds great in theory but it clearly doesn't find many takers here.
That was the downside of a perfectly wonderful morning, with the walkers learning a lot about the temples of Avenue Road. The ten temples, I think, we visited were living jewels of religiosity and may they remain that way. The crisp breakfast and piping hot coffee at a darshini were the icing on the cake and rejuvenated our flagging energy levels.
There are more walks on the same theme on the anvil, and, to be sure, I'll try to be there.
The other interesting that happened on the walking front was coming across an online reference to the book 'Wanderlust' by Rebecca Solnit. It's a history of walking and I hope to read it over the next few weeks.
I'm rediscovering the joys of walking in a virtually unwalkable city.
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