Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I thought of it the day Indira lay in a pool of blood and India seemed
poised on the brink of an abyss.
I left Yogi Ramsuratkumar there, amid the pots and pans, beneath
a seething night brimful of mysteries. My heart was well and truly
splashed across the heavens as I walked back up to the silent ashram.
Some moments you would not trade, even for another hundred years
of life.
The One God manifests Himself in two aspects so that the world
may be sustained and fostered, improved and cleansed. These
two - the terrible and the tender - are the characteristics found
together in every single thing on earth, for are they not all parts
of the selfsame God?
- Sathya Sai Baba
I started out early the next day to walk around Arunachala as Yogi
Ramsuratkumar had recommended, deciding a clockwise direction
had tradition on its side. Heading behind the ashram and off
through scrub and rocks, I soon realised this other half of the
mountain was not as conical as the Tiruvannamalai side. It sprawled
off, descending very gradually into a series of steep, irregular rocky
hillsides, and thus widened considerably more than I'd imagined at
the base. Circumambulating it would take me a bit longer than I
had calculated. There also seemed to be no obvious route. I'd
assumed there would be, that the yogi's advice was conventional
wisdom. But from where I stood, I wondered if anyone had ever
walked around the mountain. I was at least a hundred yards from
what looked like the actual base of Arunachala, which was as near
as I could get because of the density of scrub in between. Even so I
kept getting hooked on thorns like darning needles or scratched by
something with clawlike barbed spikes disguised as flowers. The
flora out here was outright vicious. Why had nature equipped these
things with such hardware?
Cursing, I ripped another thorn from my trousers and followed
the path of least resistance. After an hour of this meandering I
progressed less than a hundred yards. And the sun by this time was
sucking up the rich hues of rock, earth and foliage to stoke its boiler
