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Newasa - Encountering an unique form of Vishnu, and Sant Jnaneshwar

The year was 1290 . A crowd had gathered around a clearing, where broken down pillars marked the presence of an ancient temple, now long gone. A young boy, just 14 years old, leaned against one of those pillars, deep in thought. Then, he began speaking, and the crowd fell silent, listening to his every word. He spoke without any notes, translating the Bhagavat Gita, from Sanskrit, which only the pundits knew, to the language everyone in the village knew and spoke – a variety of Prakrit which developed into the Marathi language. Even as he spoke, one of the men in the audience realized how momentous this event was, and how important this composition would be. He began writing down the words the young boy spoke, and this composition was named by its author and composer, the Bhavartha Deepika – the enlightening meaning (of the Bhagavat Gita). Now, the ancient, holy text, was no longer restricted to the pundits, but accessible to all, understood easily by them, composed as it was, in their...
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Introducing the Ladakh Diaries

4 years ago, Shankar and I went on a trip to Ladakh and Srinagar. It was a special trip… Samhith was off in Germany, attending a German language summer camp, and the two of us were travelling by ourselves the first time in almost 13 years! We had been planning the trip for months, and the choice of destination wasn’t our first, or our second, or even our tenth! We had first planned an international trip, and selected and rejected destinations galore. Eventually, I realized I wasn’t getting excited about any of them, and that is when we decided that we would visit the part of our country we had never visited – Ladakh. After all, the timing was perfect… the roads would be open, the weather wouldn’t be too harsh, and we had almost 2 weeks, enough to get a glimpse of the region we had only seen photographs of. And so it was that in the first week of August, 2017, the two of us set off on one of our most memorable trips, ever.

I had intended to write about this trip immediately after returning. However, that did not quite work out as I had planned. For a variety of reasons, I took a break from blogging. It was meant only to be a short break, but re-starting to blog turned out to be harder than I imagined, and the short break grew longer, and longer. And Ladakh never got written about.


I had, however, maintained a diary during the entire trip, and the farther we got from mobile network and internet, the more I scribbled in it. On our return, the diary was relegated to the book shelf, and all but forgotten. And then, we shifted to a new house, and all thoughts of blogging, or the diary were relegated to the farthest recesses of my brain. A few weeks back, I stumbled upon the diary while (as usual) searching for something else, and it brought up memories…. Not only of the trip, but also of memories from the time I started my blog. I used to keep a diary then too, where I wrote about the trips we went on, and my earliest posts were little more than the jottings in my little diary. It sparked a desire to see if I could do it again, and so, I am making an effort once again, to revive the blog, with memories of my Ladakh trip, from my diary and my photographs.

Join me, on my journey, once again….. 

Coming up -

Ladakh Diaries Part 1: The Beginning - Manali to Jispa


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