First Day to Temple Town!

Barely able to open my eyes, with little bit of white light falling into them I woke up.

6:30 a.m., 55, B3, Hampi express!

Farms and farms everywhere!

We gathered our luggage and finally after long journey of 9 hours, we finally reached Hospete. When you see foreigners and school children on trips on platform, at the junction itself it becomes clear that you  have arrived to a tourist destination.

On the way to the resort, my thoughts took up a new route with the bus showing us beautiful mountains of Kishkinda area. How will Hampi be? Will it accept me the way I am? Will I be able to shed my touristy layer and become a part of Hampi? What will I do if people are fond of giving monoword answers only?

 The resort was beautiful, in lap of nature, it did seem like nature itself. Circular cottages, beautiful rooms. Sometime in life I had read about architecture which matches with the surroundings. This one did seem like one. After having South Indian breakfast and the best sweet in the world, paysam, we started with our first day.

Markets always attracted me a lot, possibilities of crafts anywhere is my interest and for Hampi I really wanted to know the base of crafts. Stone carved items, Leather bags, Tshirts with OM written on them consisted most part of the market, place where we got down. As we walked to the river, paddy fields on left side made me think coexistence of fields and human market together. Walking down the staircase we had no idea we will land up on such a beautiful place. But there stood the beautiful but fierce Tungabhadra River. Calm on surface, vicious inside. More beautiful was Virupaksha looking as if emerging from River. After crossing the river, again the market lanes.

And then we entered Virupaksha with a warning “no camera usage inside”. But inside everybody was already clicking pictures with mobile phones. There stood giant temple with beautiful sculptures on it. Long and slender the figures were, exactly like form of temple. Inside there stood giant elephant on a platform giving ashirwad to people, seemed as if the whole platform was made up for him only. All the pillars in Hampi had a peculiar style, it had two supporting for roof emerging from one same pillar. Inside of the temple, there were paintings and sculptures of a few scenes, a few ruined, a few newly made. The inverted Gopuram at back did make me realise that 15^th century technology was no less than ours, magnificent in its own ways.

There were a lot of small temples surrounding Virupaksha Temple. Seemed like guards to me. 

Then we walked a bit more to see other beautifully carved temples and then had lunch after which we hired cycles to go to LOST Vithalla temple. This is what it seemed to me, a secret place about which nobody knew about. Surrounded completely by big mountains it was a magnificent view to see such  beautifully carved temples and platforms. Every pillar said something about Hindu Mythology or culture. This was the most beautiful place in Hampi, calm and mountains seemed like a protective bubble to the place. Little did we know initially that climbing up mountain and then down which completely left me lethargic will lead to such beautiful discovery for own self.

The next after watching big nandi statue we cycled to Ganesha Temple, it was the biggest and most marvellous statue, so big and so perfectly lit by light from outside such as only Ganesha was seen and not the background at all. The statue was beautifully placed in half light.

And our last stop was Narsimha Temple which had a huge Narsimha statue and a huge Shivalinga!

One thing I realised was either in Hampi there are no Shrines in Temples or there are huge statues!

The day was very tiring today but eventful. It did leave in me an insight to see the rest of monuments in Hampi!

I was spellbound by the sculptures on pillars of temples and I really wanted to know about their relevance to Hindu Culture, Dance and Music so that I could trace the culture back till there.

Lets click!

After seeing works of Eduardo who is a photographic artist, I realised how important it was to build a sequence in a project, a story which connects to people and in a frame everything matters and everything says something. I also realised that Randomness could mean a lot. It is not always about something being in perfectly defined boundaries. Sometimes it is all about breaking the boundaries.

Hence inspired by his works, I photographed y surroundings from ants eye view. Ant has a different view to everything which is very important. Whatever it sees seems large to it, which is why need to view from ant’s eye view too, growing up we forget that the world is large, we just think about ourselves and others seem so small to us. And also in being an ant we could notice unnoticeable details of a space we cant see with human eyes. So here is my collection of selected photographs from ant’s eye view. 

Should I swim, should I sink?

(Inside of a wine bottle)

Because the whole world lies in one single bowl.

 Till when will you try to get out?

(Inside of a steel pipe)

Green goes black.

Work peddle

Talk with Arpita

Arpita’s talks gave me a lot of insights on how to approach people, how to talk to them, how to get the best out of theirs stories out. She discussed a lot of points with us where we might we stuck while interviewing people and alot of points about what can be discussed, on what part the research can be based on.  Here is what I got from her talks:

To talk to any person, to get to know their life stories, we need to know those people first by their actions, things about what they are comfortable about, things about what they feel bad about, things that they think is wrong in society and then slowly slowly getting to know the unrevealed layers of their lives. People will be hesitant, they will be reluctant to talk to you, you are none of their business, why will they like to talk to you and waste their time, why will they give any stranger information about themselves and such a case they will not even open up completely, you will just be answered in required words from which you can barely get to know what you exactly want. So hence it is important when you approach someone, you build a rapport with them and a relation with empathy in it by understanding them by their actions that what are the points they are comfortable with and once you get that string you can hit on it and then once they start getting more comfortable with you, you can start asking out questions about their lives to them.

In temple towns, the main task becomes understanding different layers of society and how those different layers feel about each other as well as about the town. The layers could be of many categories, social, professional, religious, political etc. You just need to figure out what kinds of layers are you looking into. A person can look into oral history of place, architecture, social bonds, how do people think about the place, how tourists affect a particular place or it’s culture, about different stakeholders and the effects on people’s lives.

Some of the people to whom a person can talk in such a place are local artisans, people who look that have lived here from a lot of time, shopkeepers and people who have seen the town go through thick and thin.

And hence inspired with this talk I walk forward shedding up my hesitation!

Thoughts about temples: fabricated, unfabricated

Temples- Place of?

·      God

·      Architecture

·      Peace

·      Priests

·      Culture

·      Festivals?

How many of us have actually lived these in temples? Barely anyone!

They offer so much to explore. They contain the long lasted secrets of living. They are living legends. They have so many stories.

So we were first taken to Shiva Mandir and then we were sent to different temples to research on history and cultural richness of temples and belongingness of them.

You might imagine a place with beautiful but calm architecture, A place where people would come to find their own mental peace, a place with still aura, to be a temple. But in reality that is just a temple which is unexposed to the new modern fast moving world with only concerns about  monetary things. This is what I found out about Iskcon Temple, Bangalore.

In a rush to hurry people in ques, the priests seemed to have forgotten the real meaning of temples. Our whole visit left me into questions about life moving so fast in today’s times which made me realise importance of sometimes wasting my time in just simply doing something in which I find peace and questions about these big temples being only architecturally beautiful and having to give importance to ones who found or built it, questions about what being right and what being wrong, question about the whole unseen division in the society, questions about why people do not interact, how hard it is to talk about peace? About lives? About stories?

First step to Temple Town Tales (Day 1)

We started the first class by our Introduction.

Introduction, which wasn’t ordinary.

Introduction which lead us to know about ourselves in a way we had never known before.

Introduction which lead us to our ancestors,

Which lead us to an encounter to our community

Community which is long lost and is no longer being cared about

Community whose authenticity is bygone.

Bloodline traits which were unmapped in the new world of machines instead of machine makers.

This task helped us to discover our as well as other communities across India and helped us understand why it is important to know one’s community and helped us to map some formations of communities and their culture along with geography. While discussing about everyone’s communities and origin, we realised how much each community is different but same. Every community has its own identity, own festivals, own thinkings etc.

It is important to know the communities around us as we are directly affected by them as the communities were made by people like me and you and they have been moulded by the events caused in years by people like me and you. 

There is a beauty in every culture, every community. When we delve deeper into them we realise that there is an intricate beautiful pattern in which community works and is held together by people. Every culture says a story. A story which is unique and directly affects the community.

In today’s world, community does exist but not in cultural sense. People no longer feel  the cultural belongingness. The world is changing and so is the meaning of belongingness and communities.

From this course I wish to get more sense of belongingness, culture, communities and how are events affected by them.

The second task of the day was to present an Indian dance and share some insights about the dance to the class. My group chose garba from Gujarat as we wanted to present that this vibrant 9 day festival called navratri’s one form of worshipping in form of dance.

While doing this I gained more insights on dance forms and how they affect human’s body and how different regions developed a certain kind of dance form and how is it related to human health as well as culture.

After this we had a class discussion on a story on chappal. Chappal which says a story by being completely worn out. Every gone layer did leave a mark on chappal at the same time making breathing space to chappal, laying it bare to ground, the thicks and thins of ground, unlayering the set reality, unlayering the defined boundaries leaving the foot bare to thought so that it can wander without dimensions.