Convergence - Jodhpur, Padmanabha & Kashi

binduchandana
May 12, 2020
3 min read

Updated: Mar 7, 2023

My inability to do only one thing at a time can be chalked to being female (multi-tasking in my chromosome??), undiagnosed ADHD and/or a cool magic trick that I do.

I have always looked in wonder at people who can put their head down and just focus. I just cannot. It has taken me a while to get over it and realise that it is okay to work like this - the quality should not be measured by how I work. This is the only way I work. The tv is on or I check my phone or I get up and go do something else; I need an equally compelling distraction when I work. I am aware of that and that helps a lot more than me beating up my fundamental conditioning to fit into the 'right' way of working. I cannot help it, my brain actually tells me to stop focusing so much!

The convergence of these three places in my head came from this very ability to be distractibly focused.

Over a short span of time and with some random luck I was able to travel to these three places back to back. What then appeared to be separate are really not separate, in retrospect. The underlying essence is the same everywhere - one of ritual (read it as a positive input) that has emerged differently in Padmanabha and Mehrangarh with Kashi being the energy source. Kashi is where death meets life in the most profound way possible; it pulses with the beginning of death and the promise of afterlife. And the belief and conviction of Kashi travels south and north of the Vindhyas.

The Hindu tenets are deep in all sides of our country but the manifestation in each side is so starkly different that it begs the question, why? Genetically the difference is too minute to count (The Early Indian, Tony Joseph). Our cultural conditioning is crazy different though, take a look.

ree — Padmanabhapuram Palace, Kanyakumari Taluk

How? Culture of an area, community, mindset, king, etc?

The manifestation hits you from all sides. We are so similar genetically but so different outwardly and that outside defines who we are. Biology also says the same thing. Genetic code of many living things are almost the same but slightly different and this difference makes us a monkey, potato, mouse or a man/woman. Well.

Are the similarities embedded too deep inside to see whereas the difference is painfully visible? And therefore do we rejoice, cling on and get lost in the diversity of things and have to try very hard to see how similar we are?

1. Jodhpur

A lovely music fest, tents in the backyard of the fort, full moon-lit dinner with the current king's(?) family, rocks as old as the earth, Toorji ka Jhalra (step-well) built by the queen in the mid 1700's as per tradition and pomegranate trees that first came to us from Persia.

2. Kanya Kumari

The island and backwaters and the rough sea all make for a state whose wildness is visible if you pay close attention to the edges. Umpteen people love it for its natural beauty, no arguments there. It is pretty wild.

“Gondwana Junction" - India, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, East Antarctica and Australia were together here. Will we ever get back those connections? Yes, if the plates have anything to do with it.

On the way to Gondwana junction we stopped off at the Padmanabha palace built by king Iravi Varma Kulasekhara Perumal at the beginning of 1600. It is truly innocuous for a palace. Bare, austere, functional but with the richness wood and white walls brings. Light its only ornament.