On Tuesday, November 3rd, we went to the temple town of Somanathpur. Along the way we saw our first Indian pig, being chased by a little girl. Sudha turned the bus around and we stopped at the house to meet the pigs and the people who raise them, along with some chickens.
This is very fertile land, with diversified crops: mostly rice, but also a wide variety of vegetables, corn, peanuts, etc.
We also stopped in one village where a group of wandering Rajasthani gypsies was camped by the side of the road, making iron agricultural implements. Women were turning cranks to send air down pipes to heat up small charcoal fires on the ground, in which men were heating iron red-hot, then hammering it into shape. We saw them hammering dies through the iron in order to create holes for handles.
In Somanathpur we visited the small but elaborately decorated Keshava Temple. Sudha pointed out many details that we wouldn't have noticed, but, as he said, you could wander around it for a week and not see everything. Delicately carved soapstone statues and friezes covered the outside of the many-faceted, towered, star-shaped building. Beautiful. Afterwards, more damage was done to the U.S. balance of payments, in the village shops.
On the way back, we stopped at a farm where they were raising silkworms on beds of mulberry leaves. After a certain number of days, they would transfer the worms (actually, a kind of caterpillar) to an upright wicker panel, where they would spin their yellow cocoons. Once the cocoons were finished, they would be collected and sold, as we had seen the day before. There was a drunk there, who kept trying to interact with us, but he was mostly kept away by our assistant bus driver.
When we were finished looking at the silkworms, one of the farmers hitched a pair of bullocks to his large cart and the women on our tour were helped up and taken for a short ride.
Next, we went back to Mysore to have lunch at the Lalitha Mahal Palace Hotel, a gorgeous 1920s palace built as a guest house for the Maharajah's VIP visitors. It is now a hotel, with restaurant, both getting stars from Lonely Planet, though the grandeur has become somewhat ragged around the edges in the forty years since the place became a hotel. Still, the lunch was very good. We went up to look at some of the rooms, including the one used when one of Mysore's natives comes to town, the Tamil Nadu prime minister Jayalalithaa Jayaram, a former movie star whose large portraits are seen wherever you go in that state, continuing the personality cult of her late predecessor, onetime lover and movie co-star, M.G. Ramachandran, whose statue is also everywhere, including one at the very border with Kerala.
Then we drove up the Chamundi Hill, stopping at a turnout for pictures over the city. Near the top is a 16-foot-high black statue of Shiva's transport, the bull Nandi, carved in the seventeenth century. We visited him, and there talked about to a young couple who had been married for one week.
Mysore is a beautiful, green and stately city. A century ago, the Maharajah did his best to turn it into a mini-London. An important part of that was spending 42 million rupees on a new palace to replace the wooden one that had burned down in 1897. It is huge, opulent and beautiful, a magnificent example of the mixture of British, Mughal and Hindu architecture prevalent in British India. As when visiting temples and people's homes, we were required to take our shoes off to go in, and for that there is a shoe-check. We put all our shoes in a plastic bin and Sudha handed it in and got a ticket for it.
Then we went back to the hotel and at 6:45 reconvened in Sudha's room for drinks and a summing up by Sudha, to the effect that while OAT's northern India tour, "Heart of India," has individual sights, like the Taj Mahal, that you can snip out of the whole, as organ like the heart can be separated from the body. However, one can't grab hold of the soul and excise it from the body: just so, our "Soul of India" tour was more a matter of getting to know the southern Indians in many different ways, than seeing particular sights. Well, that's more or less what he said, but not exactly, and he put it much more eloquently. We, in return, said how wonderful he had made this tour, with his unforewarned "barging in" on the lives of ordinary people.
We also indicated our appreciation of Stalin's help.
Then we went downstairs to the hotel cafe, for our Farewell Dinner, and Sudha said goodbye: he is going tomorrow morning to Sri Lanka to immediately start a tour with 24 Germans.
This is very fertile land, with diversified crops: mostly rice, but also a wide variety of vegetables, corn, peanuts, etc.
We also stopped in one village where a group of wandering Rajasthani gypsies was camped by the side of the road, making iron agricultural implements. Women were turning cranks to send air down pipes to heat up small charcoal fires on the ground, in which men were heating iron red-hot, then hammering it into shape. We saw them hammering dies through the iron in order to create holes for handles.
In Somanathpur we visited the small but elaborately decorated Keshava Temple. Sudha pointed out many details that we wouldn't have noticed, but, as he said, you could wander around it for a week and not see everything. Delicately carved soapstone statues and friezes covered the outside of the many-faceted, towered, star-shaped building. Beautiful. Afterwards, more damage was done to the U.S. balance of payments, in the village shops.
On the way back, we stopped at a farm where they were raising silkworms on beds of mulberry leaves. After a certain number of days, they would transfer the worms (actually, a kind of caterpillar) to an upright wicker panel, where they would spin their yellow cocoons. Once the cocoons were finished, they would be collected and sold, as we had seen the day before. There was a drunk there, who kept trying to interact with us, but he was mostly kept away by our assistant bus driver.
When we were finished looking at the silkworms, one of the farmers hitched a pair of bullocks to his large cart and the women on our tour were helped up and taken for a short ride.
Next, we went back to Mysore to have lunch at the Lalitha Mahal Palace Hotel, a gorgeous 1920s palace built as a guest house for the Maharajah's VIP visitors. It is now a hotel, with restaurant, both getting stars from Lonely Planet, though the grandeur has become somewhat ragged around the edges in the forty years since the place became a hotel. Still, the lunch was very good. We went up to look at some of the rooms, including the one used when one of Mysore's natives comes to town, the Tamil Nadu prime minister Jayalalithaa Jayaram, a former movie star whose large portraits are seen wherever you go in that state, continuing the personality cult of her late predecessor, onetime lover and movie co-star, M.G. Ramachandran, whose statue is also everywhere, including one at the very border with Kerala.
Then we drove up the Chamundi Hill, stopping at a turnout for pictures over the city. Near the top is a 16-foot-high black statue of Shiva's transport, the bull Nandi, carved in the seventeenth century. We visited him, and there talked about to a young couple who had been married for one week.
Mysore is a beautiful, green and stately city. A century ago, the Maharajah did his best to turn it into a mini-London. An important part of that was spending 42 million rupees on a new palace to replace the wooden one that had burned down in 1897. It is huge, opulent and beautiful, a magnificent example of the mixture of British, Mughal and Hindu architecture prevalent in British India. As when visiting temples and people's homes, we were required to take our shoes off to go in, and for that there is a shoe-check. We put all our shoes in a plastic bin and Sudha handed it in and got a ticket for it.
Then we went back to the hotel and at 6:45 reconvened in Sudha's room for drinks and a summing up by Sudha, to the effect that while OAT's northern India tour, "Heart of India," has individual sights, like the Taj Mahal, that you can snip out of the whole, as organ like the heart can be separated from the body. However, one can't grab hold of the soul and excise it from the body: just so, our "Soul of India" tour was more a matter of getting to know the southern Indians in many different ways, than seeing particular sights. Well, that's more or less what he said, but not exactly, and he put it much more eloquently. We, in return, said how wonderful he had made this tour, with his unforewarned "barging in" on the lives of ordinary people.
Then we went downstairs to the hotel cafe, for our Farewell Dinner, and Sudha said goodbye: he is going tomorrow morning to Sri Lanka to immediately start a tour with 24 Germans.
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