Things are in a sudden state of flux. I am considering a job offer with a tech-centric NGO here in Bangalore, which I would want to take up as a short-term thing, though paid and full-time. At the same time I have just come off this gig in Bijapur, which went very well and am wondering how to take that forward. The biodiesel thing is hanging in the background, I had earlier given an in-principle 'yes' to the people who had invited me to join. There are a couple of projects at Timbaktu that I took on that need to be worked on. And I am off in a week to Vizag to tutor my nephew. And lots of other smaller things to take care of. When I had come back from the trip I had written up a long list of to-dos and suddenly its all pushed to a side by this new opportunity, for which I need to decide quite quickly. Definitely a feeling of being swamped.
Lots of photos and videos from Bijapur and Hampi but uploading them is a real chore as they take such a long time and too often Blogspot or Flickr fails halfway through and I have to start yet again. Perhaps I will start with just some writeup and get to the photos later.
Hampi first. Hampi is a very unique place and hard to convey. Its amazing but is difficult to absorb and got to be frustrating. The very brief story is that it was a a huge urban area (a metropolis of its time) with perhaps a half million people living in it. It was the capital of the Vijaynagar empire of which Krishnadevaraya was the most successful king and Hakka and Bukku (whom you might remember from history textbooks) were the founders. After a decisive battle which it lost, the city was savaged by the winners to such an extent that it never recovered after that, and today is just ruins. But the ruins are so striking (so .... ruinous, one might say) that I was constantly left trying to imagine what the city might have been like in its heyday.
Well, there is a huge amount more that I learnt regarding the full story of Hampi, but I am not feeling enthused about making a history lesson of the blog. The facts are remarkable though, and for now I'll leave you with just an exhortation to learn more about it, I'm sure a google will yield more than enough information.
All the guidebooks say that you have to stay for atleast 2 days at Hampi to really soak in the atmosphere. I reached on Monday afternoon, and intensively toured the place for a day and a half and at that point got some kind of overdose, and left although I had planned to stay an extra half day. There is sooo much of stuff at Hampi and the sculpture is so elaborate, and the ruins are so striking that beyond a point it gets too much to absorb. Perhaps the right way to do it is at a very relaxed pace seeing a little each day. I squeezed in a lot during my a day and a half there, and there were atleast 2 or 3 more striking things that I particularly wanted to see but didn't get to do, not to mention like 30 other things that were mentioned in the guidemaps as worth seeing.
I was reflecting on the Hampi experience today, and got the feeling (which I have got before but not quite so strongly or definitively) that I should stop visiting Indian temples. The level of effort and ability that has gone into the architecture and sculpture is so absurdly high that it simply cannot be absorbed. Any one temple out of hundreds of th best ones would boggle your mind. So keeping on seeing these temples just isn't working beyond a point, the mind stops reacting. At the same time, all this stuff is out there, so what's an appropriate way to react or deal with it ? I think the right thing is to get engaged with this stuff in a more serious way than just gaping at it. For eg. I was just thinking that it would be *fantastic* to be part of an archeological expedition working on some ruins. Just a (far fetched) way of getting involved with the stuff more concretely. Or (again farfetched) since sculpture and carving is such a intimate part of the Indian ethos and dates back to so long, learning this art as a hobby would be a way to be in sync with Indian heritage.
Whatever -- my next holiday is going to be to go hiking somewhere in nature, far away from temples !
I uploaded about 12 of the photos to Flickr. Here is the link, the photos are all tagged with 'Hampi'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/despoki/tags/hampi/
They are well worth a full-size look. Also at the link above you should get a link to all photos on Flickr tagged with 'Hampi', so if you are interested you can click on that and get everybody's Hampi pics, not just mine. There's also a post at the Written Word.
More to come
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