Other Things I Observed Along The Way

• Placid muddy rivers
• Milestones with distances and arrrows but no names
• Dust whorls waiting to welcome you to into petrol pumps
• Malshej Ghats with trees in all (or almost all) shades of red
• A roadside winner podium made of bricks with earthern pots replacing people, with the five circle symbol painted on the side - Art perhaps?
• One man tilling his field with two undernourished oxen - everything brown in that picture
• The adjacent field had a pink turbanned man fast asleep on hard ground, right under the blazing noon sun
• Shirdi's Sai Baba Temple - like all temples crowded and clean unlike all others
• Only human lines visible everywhere
• Most people walking unconcernedly in the blazing heat on a stone floor - habit or faith?
• Shorts, ganjis, security gaurds, "I love NYC" t-shirts, metal detectors - hold on it is a temple or is it?
• Special passes, even special parking areas and people cutting lines
• Did not feel any better to be on the cutting end of the lines
• Pretending not to notice the irate glares of people standing in lines and children crying due to heat and perhaps having to wait longer
• One vendor says "grapes bolo..." "Grapes.." my aunt quipped as we walked by...
• Second temple only for men.
• Men from our families got out - two out of three agreed. My dad refused.
• Shorn of clothes, clad in a saffron sarong(?) or lungi (if u must), drenched, barefoot, headed to the temple for pooja
• What a sight! a parking lot full of men hardly wearing much, wet at that, and in all possible shapes and sizes
• The best part? Nobody among them seemed to care.What if women were do such a ritual... and if we got past the melee of women drenched in precious little... would they be just as unself conscious?
• Good thing only men had to do this.
• All this interrupted intermittenly with respective scores of India and Pakistan.