The Cochin saree that accompanied me on all my Pilgrimage temple pujas throughout 2020 I arrived into Delhi on 19th November 2019 and spent a few days there adjusting to the immense change in my circumstances. The last time I had been in the country was back in March of that year, and that […]
It was a short drive down to Kagbeni, a small village cum town that, given its strategic location between Jomsom and Muktinath, has likely served as a staging post for pilgrimage traffic across the centuries, given the town itself is some eight hundred years old. I had been aware of Yac Donalds for some time, […]
Morning duly dawned. Amongst a series of nightmares that night, I had also dreamt that I would forget the flowers I had bought for the temple down in Kagbeni. Customarily you find stalls selling garlands and flowers for temple offerings outside Hindu temples, but at this height there are few flowers of the sort standardly […]
I set off the following morning at ten, in a beat up car that passed for a taxi. After the gruelling ten hours drive up from Pokhara, it was only around an hour and a half to Muktinath on roads that were at least navigable. As we left Jomsom, the stark bleached arid mountainscapes unfolded […]
The journey upwards took some ten hours in total, with a brief stop for lunch, and we rattled into Jomsom at six in the evening, just as the light was starting to fade. No city this, more an extended village of mainly traditional houses which, being the location of the airport, had expanded a little […]
The Sanskrit word ”Mukti” (also Moksha) broadly translates as ‘salvation’. In Eastern religions and theological traditions with their implicit belief in reincarnation, salvation is understood rather differently to the way it is in Christianity, with its emphasis on hellfire and damnation. Salvation here means freedom from the otherwise eternal cycle of reincarnation, envisaged as a […]