Before leaving Mysore on the morning of the 15th, I took an early morning walk, making a circuit around the palace. I passed some grand old colonial era buildings on its west side, some in good repair and some not, including buildings that used to be used to provision the palace, a school, and the city corporation building. I entered the palace's south gate and visited an old temple complex just inside the gate. The main temple, just inside the tall gopuram (entry tower), was closed, but a smaller temple with beautifully painted walls with stories from the epics was open. I wandered around a bit in the temple complex before leaving to complete the circuit around the palace and having breakfast.
About 10:30 I left on a bus heading northeast to Bangalore, about 80 miles away. The rolling countryside had some sugar cane and lots of coconut palms. The road was four lanes most of the way, except through the cities on the way. Nearing Bangalore we passed some very impressive rocky hills. I've read that David Lean filmed some of the cave scenes in his A Passage to India in this area, rather than do it where it is set in the book, in Bihar, which in the 1980's was notorious for crime. The bus slowed down considerably as we approached Bangalore and became ensnarled in its traffic. We arrived about 2 and it took me about a half hour of looking around the area near the bus station before I discovered I had not arrived at the central bus station, but an outlying but still large one. I took a shuttle bus to the huge central station and then an auto rickshaw through more thick traffic to a hotel I had booked from Mysore. Upon arrival I discovered it was three times as expensive as listed in my most recent guidebook, almost $30 a night. I should have asked on the phone. After all the trouble of getting there, I checked in and then took a walk.
Bangalore (renamed Bengaluru in 2006, though it seems almost everyone still calls it Bangalore) is India's IT capital, though some of the industry is shifting to other places, especially Hyderabad and Pune, and it is booming. It had about 600,000 people at independence and around 4 million, I think, 20 years ago. I've read it now has 8 million people, although a recent newspaper said the 2011 census counted 11 million. With its many parks, it was and is known as the Garden City, but with the huge number of people and accompanying traffic and pollution, it is less of a garden than before. It is at about 3000 feet elevation, so it has a pleasant climate, except for the smog.
I walked down the main street, MG Road (MG for Mahatma Gandhi; almost every city in India seems to have an MG Road), with traffic whizzing by. The sidewalks were uneven and almost an obstacle course. But there were some nice buildings, both colonial and new ones, and quite a few trees. One attractive old stone building, the 1912 Tract and Book Society Building, right next to the Bible Society of India, is now a Hard Rock Cafe. The elevated metro line runs down the middle of MG Road, though only five stations are open now. There is metro construction in several places in the city. After more than a mile I passed the large St. Mark's Cathedral and entered Cubbon Park, a large park (something like 300 acres) right in the city center. It's a beautiful park, full of big trees and lots of bamboo. A 1906 statue of Queen Victoria stands at the entrance, dedicated by her grandson the Prince of Wales. (A statue of Gandhi is across the street.) Bangalore, despite changing its name to a precolonial name, doesn't seem to mind colonial statues and street names. In most other Indian cities the statue of the queen would have been removed. I walked through the park until almost dark. The red High Court is on one side, with an equestrian statue of what appears to be a British general behind the gate. The monumental Vidhana Soudha, built to house the state government in 1954, is across the street from the High Court and the park. I also walked past a dilapidated bandstand and a colonial era library building in the park before making my way out and back to my hotel.
I changed hotels the next morning, taking an auto rickshaw to a ten dollar a night one near the bus station. Then I took an auto rickshaw back to Cubbon Park, getting off near the Vidhana Soudha and the High Court. It was a Saturday, so the traffic was not as bad as on a weekday. I walked through the park, very nice in the morning. I walked past Queen Victoria's statue again, and found one of Edward VII. After an early lunch at a Subway (lots of American fast food outlets in Bangalore), I visited two museums on the periphery of the park, an extensive and very interesting industrial and technological museum, with all sorts of working models, and the old Government Museum, dating from the 1800's, with sculpture and paintings and the like.
In the mid afternoon I took an auto rickshaw to the Bangalore palace of the Maharaja of Mysore. The palace was built in the 1870's in the style of Windsor Castle. The current Maharaja apparently lives there. (The palace in Mysore now belongs to the state, though I understand the Maharaja is appealing the court verdict that awarded it to the state.) It cost a whopping 450 rupees to enter, though you did get an audio guide, oozing sycophancy. The palace was interesting, though, with a magnificent staircase leading to a durbar hall. There were separate quarters for men and women, elephant foot stools (and a massive elephant head mounted in the entry), and lots of very interesting photographs of the maharajas and their families. The current maharaja looks fairly disreputable, and looked even more so in his younger days, in what appear to be photographs from the 1970's. There are also an awful lot of paintings of nude women, almost all western, on the walls. As I left the palace for a short walk around the grounds, with dead grass and lots of litter, I noticed two automobiles, a Mercedes sedan and an SUV, both with the insignia of the Maharaja on the front. There were many old carriages, all in very poor condition, and several cannons on the grounds, through which I wandered until about 6.
The next morning I took an auto rickshaw to the huge city market, very dirty but full of activity. It is quite a contrast to the modern Bangalore of MG Road. I wandered around and spent quite a bit of time watching the flower sellers. Nearby is the large Jama Masjid, the city's main mosque, but it was closed. Also nearby is what remains of the Bangalore Fort. On the sidewalk outside its walls a woman was selling strands of long black human hair, and they weren't too expensive: only about one to three dollars, depending on the length. I walked through the fort's impressive three gateway entry, but that is about all there is left. It was captured by Cornwallis in 1791 and returned to Tipu the next year after the peace settlement following the Third Anglo-Mysore War in which Tipu turned over two of this sons as hostages. I read that in this peace settlement he also reimbursed the British for their expenses in the war and ceded them half of his territory.
A little further south is what remains of Tipu's Summer Palace. Commenced by Haider Ali in 1781 and finished by Tipu in 1791, it is similar to the summer palace in Srirangapatna, but almost all the painting has been lost. It was interesting to wander through, though, with many tall teak pillars and little rooms and verandas.
Next door is one of Bangalore's oldest Hindu temples and I went there next. The temple itself is not that interesting, but I arrived during a long and fascinating ceremony in the courtyard that I watched for over an hour. About eight priests were involved, conducting all sorts of ceremonies with flowers, coconuts, milk, water, oil and fire, and much else. Music was provided by three musicians, one playing one of those long Indian horns, one a two sided drum, and one a clarinet. The people watching the ceremony, a family group, were friendly and seemed happy to have me there. I was photographed several times by their photographer. I was told the ceremony was to provide good luck to a couple on their wedding anniversary. To do so, the priests were reenacting the wedding of Vishnu and Lakshmi. Near the end, a mixture of milk or perhaps yogurt mixed with chunks of coconut and pomegranate seeds was dispensed by spoonfuls by a priest into the hands of the family members. After the ceremony, money, ten rupee notes and coins, was given out by the family. I saw one old man reprimanded for getting in line more than once.
I was getting hungry and walked to a famous Bangalore restaurant, the Malvalli Tiffin Rooms, in business since 1924. It has some interesting photos on the walls and provided a delicious lunch for 170 rupees. You buy a ticket and stand in a queue for a table to open, but since I was by myself, I got seated right away with three others at a table for four. The Brahmin vegetarian lunch had maybe ten different dishes, several vegetable dishes plus rice and dosas (a spongy pancake). Also included were a deep fried section of a bell pepper, fruit juice, a sweet soup, curd rice, coconut flavored barfi (a dessert), plus ice cream with little chunks of fruit. And they kept refilling portions, if you wished.
The restaurant is near the entrance for the Lal Bagh Botanical Garden, where I went next. Started by Haider Ali in 1760, it was improved and expanded by Tipu and, later, by British experts from Kew Gardens in London. It comprises 240 acres. I walked around, trying to avoid the afternoon sun, and then sat for a while reading a newspaper until it cooled off a bit. Inside, besides some majestic trees and a fenced, scraggly rose garden, are a bandstand and a glass house modeled on the Crystal Palace in London dating from the 1880's. Some trees were planted by notables, including Queen Elizabeth, Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and "Niktha Krushova, President (U.S.S.R.) Russia." On a rocky outcrop is a small tower said to be one of the four built by the city's founder, Kempe Gowda, in the 16th century. There were lots of people on that Sunday afternoon, but it wasn't overwhelmed with people, as there is a ten rupee entry fee. I stayed until about 5:30 and then took an auto rickshaw back to my hotel. As always in Bangalore, it took a while to find one that would use his meter.
I left Bangalore the next morning soon after 9, on a luxury bus heading north to Puttaparthi, about 90 miles away. I probably should have waited for a regular bus, but the luxury one was leaving right away. It cost about twice as much as a regular bus would have cost, but still less than $6. There were only about ten of us on it and it traveled non-stop, but for one 20 minute break half way there. And it took only 3 hours to get to Puttaparthi, despite our slow progress getting out of Bangalore's heavy Monday morning traffic. Once out of the city we passed some sugar cane and lots of coconut palms, and even some vineyards, but the landscape soon became dry and rocky as we headed north. We past the Nandi Hills to our west. These are large, rocky hills, some that seem to be solid slabs of granite. One of them is Nandidurg, with a former fort atop it. We reached the Karnataka-Andhra Pradesh border (I ended up spending more than two months in Karnataka all together) and the scenery continued fairly desolate as we turned off onto a back road to reach Puttaparthi.
Puttaparthi, at somewhere between 1500 and 2000 feet elevation, is the hometown and site of the ashram of Sai Baba, who claimed he was the reincarnation of the original Sai Baba, a still widely revered holy man from Shirdi in Maharashtra who died in 1918. Puttaparthi's Sai Baba was born in 1926 and died just recently, in 2011, after predicting that his reincarnation would be born eight years after his death. He started the ashram in 1950 and is said to have begun working miracles when he was 14. His concerned parents took him to priests who concluded he was not possessed by devils but by a god. During his ministry he is said to have deemphasized the miracle working aspect and focused on spreading a message of universal love. There are all sorts of his sayings (and his photos) all over town. Even on the backs of auto rickshaws there are his portraits and sayings such as "Love All. Serve All." and "Help Ever. Hurt Never." He was an odd looking guy, about 5 feet tall with a gigantic afro haircut, and in fact a sort of drooping, collapsed afro. (One of my guide books calls it a Jimi Hendrix afro.) He had, and still has, millions of followers, though, both Indian and foreign. He almost always wore an orange cassock and apparently staged some spectacular ceremonies (for example, with motorcycles).
I checked into a small hotel upon arrival for the surprising sum of 100 rupees, less than $2, a night and got a clean and comfortable, though small, room. (I later talked to a French woman who stayed in the ashram and she paid only 25 a night.) After lunch and resting a bit, I took a walk around town. Puttaparthi is just a small place, but Sai Baba's presence gave it a fancy hospital and schools, besides the enormous ashram itself. I walked through the ashram after going through security. Inside are vast blocks of housing for devotees, canteens, shops (including a book store, with hundreds of books in many languages by and about Sai Baba and music videos, including one entitled "Sai Baba Sings"), and an enormous hall where Sai Baba used to minister to his flock. About 4:30 an evening service began in the hall, decorated in light pinks, blues and yellows and with dozens of chandeliers, that lasted until 6, with music provided by white clad devotees singing and playing a harmonium, tablas and cymbals while an enormous crowd gathered. I went into the hall, sat on the floor with the others and listened. Towards 6 there was a fire aarti in front of an empty chair at the front next to a sort of altar marked with "Love All. Serve All." and with a giant photo of Sai Baba behind it. After the aarti the music ended and devotees lined up to kneel and then touch their heads to the floor in front of the altar after standing in long lines. I watched for almost an hour and they still hadn't finished. There were quite a few westerners present, but the overwhelming majority were Indians. The majority wore white clothing, and you are not allowed in with shorts. Security both to get in the ashram and into the hall involved going through an electronic door frame and then getting frisked by three guys. The workers are all very polite, bowing with folded hands and greeting you with "Sai Ram." As I came out of the hall I noticed hundreds of fruit bats in the sky, flying right overhead, as close as 30 or 40 feet above at times. I watched them until it got too dark to see them.
The next morning I spent about an hour at the morning service, which lasts for an hour and a half and is the same as the evening service. Fewer people were present, though. Afterward I noticed dozens of fruit bats hanging from nearby trees. Quite a few were chirping or flapping their wings and occasionally one would fly about a bit before returning to a tree.
At 11 I took a bus back along the way I had come the day before for about 30 miles and then took another bus west another ten miles to the little town of Lepakshi to see its temple. The second bus was soon crammed to the rafters with schoolkids and others. I noticed one little boy had a Barbie bag. I suppose neither he nor, fortunately for him, his schoolmates know anything about Barbie. The temple site is supposed to be the place where a big bird (named Jatayu, as opposed to Big Bird) tried to stop Ravanna's abduction of Sita. Ravanna killed the bird and Rama is supposed to have said to the slain bird "Lepakshi," which means "Get up, bird." The temple was built by a Vijayanagar king in 1538 atop a large granite outcrop. It is a large temple, with excellent sculpture in its two halls. The first hall has something like 60 pillars, and the ceiling is painted with very interesting scenes, from the Ramayana, I think. Some are very well preserved. The sanctuary has a black statue of Shiva largely encased in gold and silver and colorful fabric. A garrulous priest (usually they are not so friendly) talked to me for quite a while, though he was a bit hard to understand. He wanted my phone number so his brother in Alabama could call me and in fact called his brother on his cell phone. The brother was sleeping as it was about 1 a.m. in Alabama but we reached voice mail. I eventually got him to understand that I have no phone, but then he wanted to give me his brother's three phone numbers so I could call him.
After spending quite a bit of time in the halls with their interesting sculpture and ceiling paintings, I took a walk around the temple compound, surrounded by arcades. Behind the main temple is a 20 foot high naga (seven headed snake) shielding a linga. I then walked to the Nandi (Shiva's bull) statue east of the temple. It is something like 27 feet long and 15 feet high. Made of yellowish stone, it is supposed to be India's largest Nandi statue. It was a hot day. The newspaper had forecast a high of about 102 for a town to the north. But there was little humidity. I headed back to Puttaparthi, which took me four buses and well over two hours, getting back at 7 just as it got dark.
About 10:30 I left on a bus heading northeast to Bangalore, about 80 miles away. The rolling countryside had some sugar cane and lots of coconut palms. The road was four lanes most of the way, except through the cities on the way. Nearing Bangalore we passed some very impressive rocky hills. I've read that David Lean filmed some of the cave scenes in his A Passage to India in this area, rather than do it where it is set in the book, in Bihar, which in the 1980's was notorious for crime. The bus slowed down considerably as we approached Bangalore and became ensnarled in its traffic. We arrived about 2 and it took me about a half hour of looking around the area near the bus station before I discovered I had not arrived at the central bus station, but an outlying but still large one. I took a shuttle bus to the huge central station and then an auto rickshaw through more thick traffic to a hotel I had booked from Mysore. Upon arrival I discovered it was three times as expensive as listed in my most recent guidebook, almost $30 a night. I should have asked on the phone. After all the trouble of getting there, I checked in and then took a walk.
Bangalore (renamed Bengaluru in 2006, though it seems almost everyone still calls it Bangalore) is India's IT capital, though some of the industry is shifting to other places, especially Hyderabad and Pune, and it is booming. It had about 600,000 people at independence and around 4 million, I think, 20 years ago. I've read it now has 8 million people, although a recent newspaper said the 2011 census counted 11 million. With its many parks, it was and is known as the Garden City, but with the huge number of people and accompanying traffic and pollution, it is less of a garden than before. It is at about 3000 feet elevation, so it has a pleasant climate, except for the smog.
I walked down the main street, MG Road (MG for Mahatma Gandhi; almost every city in India seems to have an MG Road), with traffic whizzing by. The sidewalks were uneven and almost an obstacle course. But there were some nice buildings, both colonial and new ones, and quite a few trees. One attractive old stone building, the 1912 Tract and Book Society Building, right next to the Bible Society of India, is now a Hard Rock Cafe. The elevated metro line runs down the middle of MG Road, though only five stations are open now. There is metro construction in several places in the city. After more than a mile I passed the large St. Mark's Cathedral and entered Cubbon Park, a large park (something like 300 acres) right in the city center. It's a beautiful park, full of big trees and lots of bamboo. A 1906 statue of Queen Victoria stands at the entrance, dedicated by her grandson the Prince of Wales. (A statue of Gandhi is across the street.) Bangalore, despite changing its name to a precolonial name, doesn't seem to mind colonial statues and street names. In most other Indian cities the statue of the queen would have been removed. I walked through the park until almost dark. The red High Court is on one side, with an equestrian statue of what appears to be a British general behind the gate. The monumental Vidhana Soudha, built to house the state government in 1954, is across the street from the High Court and the park. I also walked past a dilapidated bandstand and a colonial era library building in the park before making my way out and back to my hotel.
I changed hotels the next morning, taking an auto rickshaw to a ten dollar a night one near the bus station. Then I took an auto rickshaw back to Cubbon Park, getting off near the Vidhana Soudha and the High Court. It was a Saturday, so the traffic was not as bad as on a weekday. I walked through the park, very nice in the morning. I walked past Queen Victoria's statue again, and found one of Edward VII. After an early lunch at a Subway (lots of American fast food outlets in Bangalore), I visited two museums on the periphery of the park, an extensive and very interesting industrial and technological museum, with all sorts of working models, and the old Government Museum, dating from the 1800's, with sculpture and paintings and the like.
In the mid afternoon I took an auto rickshaw to the Bangalore palace of the Maharaja of Mysore. The palace was built in the 1870's in the style of Windsor Castle. The current Maharaja apparently lives there. (The palace in Mysore now belongs to the state, though I understand the Maharaja is appealing the court verdict that awarded it to the state.) It cost a whopping 450 rupees to enter, though you did get an audio guide, oozing sycophancy. The palace was interesting, though, with a magnificent staircase leading to a durbar hall. There were separate quarters for men and women, elephant foot stools (and a massive elephant head mounted in the entry), and lots of very interesting photographs of the maharajas and their families. The current maharaja looks fairly disreputable, and looked even more so in his younger days, in what appear to be photographs from the 1970's. There are also an awful lot of paintings of nude women, almost all western, on the walls. As I left the palace for a short walk around the grounds, with dead grass and lots of litter, I noticed two automobiles, a Mercedes sedan and an SUV, both with the insignia of the Maharaja on the front. There were many old carriages, all in very poor condition, and several cannons on the grounds, through which I wandered until about 6.
The next morning I took an auto rickshaw to the huge city market, very dirty but full of activity. It is quite a contrast to the modern Bangalore of MG Road. I wandered around and spent quite a bit of time watching the flower sellers. Nearby is the large Jama Masjid, the city's main mosque, but it was closed. Also nearby is what remains of the Bangalore Fort. On the sidewalk outside its walls a woman was selling strands of long black human hair, and they weren't too expensive: only about one to three dollars, depending on the length. I walked through the fort's impressive three gateway entry, but that is about all there is left. It was captured by Cornwallis in 1791 and returned to Tipu the next year after the peace settlement following the Third Anglo-Mysore War in which Tipu turned over two of this sons as hostages. I read that in this peace settlement he also reimbursed the British for their expenses in the war and ceded them half of his territory.
A little further south is what remains of Tipu's Summer Palace. Commenced by Haider Ali in 1781 and finished by Tipu in 1791, it is similar to the summer palace in Srirangapatna, but almost all the painting has been lost. It was interesting to wander through, though, with many tall teak pillars and little rooms and verandas.
Next door is one of Bangalore's oldest Hindu temples and I went there next. The temple itself is not that interesting, but I arrived during a long and fascinating ceremony in the courtyard that I watched for over an hour. About eight priests were involved, conducting all sorts of ceremonies with flowers, coconuts, milk, water, oil and fire, and much else. Music was provided by three musicians, one playing one of those long Indian horns, one a two sided drum, and one a clarinet. The people watching the ceremony, a family group, were friendly and seemed happy to have me there. I was photographed several times by their photographer. I was told the ceremony was to provide good luck to a couple on their wedding anniversary. To do so, the priests were reenacting the wedding of Vishnu and Lakshmi. Near the end, a mixture of milk or perhaps yogurt mixed with chunks of coconut and pomegranate seeds was dispensed by spoonfuls by a priest into the hands of the family members. After the ceremony, money, ten rupee notes and coins, was given out by the family. I saw one old man reprimanded for getting in line more than once.
I was getting hungry and walked to a famous Bangalore restaurant, the Malvalli Tiffin Rooms, in business since 1924. It has some interesting photos on the walls and provided a delicious lunch for 170 rupees. You buy a ticket and stand in a queue for a table to open, but since I was by myself, I got seated right away with three others at a table for four. The Brahmin vegetarian lunch had maybe ten different dishes, several vegetable dishes plus rice and dosas (a spongy pancake). Also included were a deep fried section of a bell pepper, fruit juice, a sweet soup, curd rice, coconut flavored barfi (a dessert), plus ice cream with little chunks of fruit. And they kept refilling portions, if you wished.
The restaurant is near the entrance for the Lal Bagh Botanical Garden, where I went next. Started by Haider Ali in 1760, it was improved and expanded by Tipu and, later, by British experts from Kew Gardens in London. It comprises 240 acres. I walked around, trying to avoid the afternoon sun, and then sat for a while reading a newspaper until it cooled off a bit. Inside, besides some majestic trees and a fenced, scraggly rose garden, are a bandstand and a glass house modeled on the Crystal Palace in London dating from the 1880's. Some trees were planted by notables, including Queen Elizabeth, Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and "Niktha Krushova, President (U.S.S.R.) Russia." On a rocky outcrop is a small tower said to be one of the four built by the city's founder, Kempe Gowda, in the 16th century. There were lots of people on that Sunday afternoon, but it wasn't overwhelmed with people, as there is a ten rupee entry fee. I stayed until about 5:30 and then took an auto rickshaw back to my hotel. As always in Bangalore, it took a while to find one that would use his meter.
I left Bangalore the next morning soon after 9, on a luxury bus heading north to Puttaparthi, about 90 miles away. I probably should have waited for a regular bus, but the luxury one was leaving right away. It cost about twice as much as a regular bus would have cost, but still less than $6. There were only about ten of us on it and it traveled non-stop, but for one 20 minute break half way there. And it took only 3 hours to get to Puttaparthi, despite our slow progress getting out of Bangalore's heavy Monday morning traffic. Once out of the city we passed some sugar cane and lots of coconut palms, and even some vineyards, but the landscape soon became dry and rocky as we headed north. We past the Nandi Hills to our west. These are large, rocky hills, some that seem to be solid slabs of granite. One of them is Nandidurg, with a former fort atop it. We reached the Karnataka-Andhra Pradesh border (I ended up spending more than two months in Karnataka all together) and the scenery continued fairly desolate as we turned off onto a back road to reach Puttaparthi.
Puttaparthi, at somewhere between 1500 and 2000 feet elevation, is the hometown and site of the ashram of Sai Baba, who claimed he was the reincarnation of the original Sai Baba, a still widely revered holy man from Shirdi in Maharashtra who died in 1918. Puttaparthi's Sai Baba was born in 1926 and died just recently, in 2011, after predicting that his reincarnation would be born eight years after his death. He started the ashram in 1950 and is said to have begun working miracles when he was 14. His concerned parents took him to priests who concluded he was not possessed by devils but by a god. During his ministry he is said to have deemphasized the miracle working aspect and focused on spreading a message of universal love. There are all sorts of his sayings (and his photos) all over town. Even on the backs of auto rickshaws there are his portraits and sayings such as "Love All. Serve All." and "Help Ever. Hurt Never." He was an odd looking guy, about 5 feet tall with a gigantic afro haircut, and in fact a sort of drooping, collapsed afro. (One of my guide books calls it a Jimi Hendrix afro.) He had, and still has, millions of followers, though, both Indian and foreign. He almost always wore an orange cassock and apparently staged some spectacular ceremonies (for example, with motorcycles).
I checked into a small hotel upon arrival for the surprising sum of 100 rupees, less than $2, a night and got a clean and comfortable, though small, room. (I later talked to a French woman who stayed in the ashram and she paid only 25 a night.) After lunch and resting a bit, I took a walk around town. Puttaparthi is just a small place, but Sai Baba's presence gave it a fancy hospital and schools, besides the enormous ashram itself. I walked through the ashram after going through security. Inside are vast blocks of housing for devotees, canteens, shops (including a book store, with hundreds of books in many languages by and about Sai Baba and music videos, including one entitled "Sai Baba Sings"), and an enormous hall where Sai Baba used to minister to his flock. About 4:30 an evening service began in the hall, decorated in light pinks, blues and yellows and with dozens of chandeliers, that lasted until 6, with music provided by white clad devotees singing and playing a harmonium, tablas and cymbals while an enormous crowd gathered. I went into the hall, sat on the floor with the others and listened. Towards 6 there was a fire aarti in front of an empty chair at the front next to a sort of altar marked with "Love All. Serve All." and with a giant photo of Sai Baba behind it. After the aarti the music ended and devotees lined up to kneel and then touch their heads to the floor in front of the altar after standing in long lines. I watched for almost an hour and they still hadn't finished. There were quite a few westerners present, but the overwhelming majority were Indians. The majority wore white clothing, and you are not allowed in with shorts. Security both to get in the ashram and into the hall involved going through an electronic door frame and then getting frisked by three guys. The workers are all very polite, bowing with folded hands and greeting you with "Sai Ram." As I came out of the hall I noticed hundreds of fruit bats in the sky, flying right overhead, as close as 30 or 40 feet above at times. I watched them until it got too dark to see them.
The next morning I spent about an hour at the morning service, which lasts for an hour and a half and is the same as the evening service. Fewer people were present, though. Afterward I noticed dozens of fruit bats hanging from nearby trees. Quite a few were chirping or flapping their wings and occasionally one would fly about a bit before returning to a tree.
At 11 I took a bus back along the way I had come the day before for about 30 miles and then took another bus west another ten miles to the little town of Lepakshi to see its temple. The second bus was soon crammed to the rafters with schoolkids and others. I noticed one little boy had a Barbie bag. I suppose neither he nor, fortunately for him, his schoolmates know anything about Barbie. The temple site is supposed to be the place where a big bird (named Jatayu, as opposed to Big Bird) tried to stop Ravanna's abduction of Sita. Ravanna killed the bird and Rama is supposed to have said to the slain bird "Lepakshi," which means "Get up, bird." The temple was built by a Vijayanagar king in 1538 atop a large granite outcrop. It is a large temple, with excellent sculpture in its two halls. The first hall has something like 60 pillars, and the ceiling is painted with very interesting scenes, from the Ramayana, I think. Some are very well preserved. The sanctuary has a black statue of Shiva largely encased in gold and silver and colorful fabric. A garrulous priest (usually they are not so friendly) talked to me for quite a while, though he was a bit hard to understand. He wanted my phone number so his brother in Alabama could call me and in fact called his brother on his cell phone. The brother was sleeping as it was about 1 a.m. in Alabama but we reached voice mail. I eventually got him to understand that I have no phone, but then he wanted to give me his brother's three phone numbers so I could call him.
After spending quite a bit of time in the halls with their interesting sculpture and ceiling paintings, I took a walk around the temple compound, surrounded by arcades. Behind the main temple is a 20 foot high naga (seven headed snake) shielding a linga. I then walked to the Nandi (Shiva's bull) statue east of the temple. It is something like 27 feet long and 15 feet high. Made of yellowish stone, it is supposed to be India's largest Nandi statue. It was a hot day. The newspaper had forecast a high of about 102 for a town to the north. But there was little humidity. I headed back to Puttaparthi, which took me four buses and well over two hours, getting back at 7 just as it got dark.
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