Pictures

Here are a few recent pictures.

Spurthi rocks

Protest

Learning new words

Filling the bucket


Really upset

One little monkey jumping on the bed

Spurthi, says 'jump' and try to make a movement of jump. She had been trying since last one / two months to jump. Only last week she managed to finally lift both the feet off ground.

She also does this 'danch' - dance. Which is going round and round. We are not sure from where she got this idea of dance - must be from cortoon netwrok.

Lepakshi

Most of the tourists and travel photographers visiting India rarely come across information about attractive historic monuments / temples of Andhrapradesh. Most of them limit their trips to the so called golden Triangle - Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. Even those making it to Southern India, do not know about great locations of Andhra Pradesh. Until recently, AP government did a very poor job of promoting the tourist potential of the state. Now, due to the improvements in state highways, and the overall increase in the income levels of Indian urban middle class, locals are constantly in search of interesting locations for a day trip from major cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad etc. As a result of that, many individuals are exploring the state and sharing that in blogs.

I wanted to see Lepakshi from a long time. This time I googled as much as I could before leaving states and had some idea of how to get there. Since this is our first visit to India with our 1 year old daughter, Aparna and baby decided not to join me for this trip. Suresh and me took Shatabdi to Bangalore and from there Ram drove us to Lepakshi.

We started from Bangalore around 10 in the morning and reached Lepakshi without trouble by 3 pm. There are two attractions in Lepakshi, one is the popular Nandi, the other one is the VeeraBhadra temple. We went there with plan to spend one sunset and sunrise to take advantage of side lighting to take pictures. The tourism centres guest house is next to Nandi. We visited the place and decided to stay in Hindupur, which is only about 10 km from Lepakshi. Ram and Suresh liked the food that was served in the road side stall next to the temple. I could not eat anything for the next three days due to digestive problems I got by drinking non bottled water in Banglore. I took the advice to drink from bottle only very lightly, that was a great mistake.

The temple outer wall and steps seems to have been constructed recently. Temple itself was built in 16th century. The architecture inside the temple was amazing. Those sculptures, after centuries of neglect and abuse, still give us an idea about those artists passion. There is so much detail carved into each and every rock and every corner. It was probably an effort of several hundreds of artists, we have no record of how many years they worked. The mandapam outside the temple was either incomplete or was destroyed.

The paintings of Lepakshi are a wonderful resource to study period social attire and life of Vijayanagara times. Later, when I saw a book on Michelangelo, I tried to find if there was any reference on his work being an influence to this type of paining on the ceilings, but could not find any. What ever technique they used to prepare those colours definitely gave a wonderful result. Some parts of the ceilings the paintings look very impressive. Most of the places due to rain and poor maintenance, they are in very bad shape. Here are few paintings.

For anyone interested in art / architecture of Vijayanagara period Lepakshi is must to go place. Even for a casual traveler to get a day out of cityscape it is a good destination.

Spurthi first birthday album

September 16 2006.

Jacksonville, FL

Spurthi entering to greet her friends who came for the party.

Srividya, Sivani and their mothers watching the decorations.

Spurthi and parents with cake.

Kinds with pinyata...

Enjoying the party.

Group photos.





The cake.

swa~ga~thaa~lu

swa~ga~tham in Telugu means a monologue, an extended speech by one person only. All of the Telugu plays I have seen / read have monologues. Most of them are lengthy and boring or just buffoonery, except those of ‘Sri N. Girisam’ of Kanyasulkam. The play begins and ends with his monologue. His famous lines “damn it, katha addam tirigindi” are as popular in Telugu literature as of Hamlets 'to be or not to be'.

Naming this blog as a monologue grants me license to be lengthy and boring. If you find them interesting, consider that unintentional.

I am planning to post some pictures of our daughter and some tales of her once in while along with a few bits and pieces of other information I want to keep as an online notes.

Regards
Ramana
(PS: I searched for a drawing of Girisam by Sri Bapu. Could not find it, therefore using his other image called 'comedy' from his series on nine rasas (nine emotions).)