Blog 1801: Never gone :-)

Apologies, apologies and more apologies for having played truant from Blogsville for so long! More explanations etc later... for now, here's an article I wrote for the San Diego Reader a li'l while ago :-)

Julius Caesar once said, “In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes”. I guess in life too, the biggest of events could result from the most innocuous of incidents. You wouldn’t really guess that a visit to a historical palace could trigger monumental self-realizations in a bunch of college students. We ourselves didn’t. Now we know better.

Eight of us packed our bags one sleepy Sunday morning and set out to reach Mysore, an important city throughout most of India’s history and situated nearly 120 kms from Bangalore. The plan: leave early, get there early, cover maximum possible ground and report back to base.

Things would, really, have gone to plan but for two teeny-weeny acts of oversight on out part. Firstly, we had no idea Mysore had well defined tourist packages which covered all the major attractions there. Secondly, we absolutely had no idea that those tours began approximately 10 minutes before the time at which we’d left Bangalore.

Anyways, we managed to get ourselves tickets for the second half of one such tour package on the condition that 6 of us would get seats in the bus but two would have to make do with sitting on stools.

The first stop on our tour was the grand Palace of Mysore. While our driver cum guide eagerly told us all he could about the palace, the 8 of us solemnly agreed that all we’d really heard was that the bus would stop there for half an hour and then push off.

To say that Mysore Palace is grand would be like saying that Michael Schumacher knows how to drive a car. This palace is grand with a capital G! You’re greeted by a larger than life sized leopard as soon as you enter the palace and as you move on a little, on the far side of the lawns, you see a herd of elephants maintained by the palace languidly munching stuff and acting royal. And oh, the leopard’s made of stone.

The seven arches at the front of the palace highlight its expansiveness and as you look a little higher, you see something resembling a grandstand facing the huge garden in front of it. The sheer magnitude of the structure is enough to cast you back to the times when there must have been princes and armies inhabiting the palace. You imagine the king sitting proudly atop the palace façade and watching the army with the elephants and horses assembled for his address. You imagine yourself for a fleeting moment occupying the position of that king and beholding this titanic set-up waiting for your command. Its tough, nay it’s impossible, being there and not being mesmerized by the colossus all around you.

As we moved closer to the palace, we noticed the multitude of light bulbs lined up all along the palace walls and edges. We collected from the guides around us that the palace was lit up every Sunday evening and on public holidays. If nothing else, this brilliant spectacle itself is enough to draw plenty of visitors to Mysore.

As we moved into the palace, we were confronted by a series of cannons placed along the railings. There’s a story in Indian history which says that Mangal Pandey, an Indian in the British army who triggered India’s first war of Independence, actually marched up and put his chest to the cannon mouth when it came to it. Heaven knows why, but I decided I’d like to check out how it feels to stand defiantly in front of a cannon. That I did, and it dawned on me what it must have been like standing in front of a live cannon with an enemy soldier ready to spark it at the slightest hint from above. Hair raising!

As we entered the interiors, we were filled with awe at the sight of the carvings on the ceilings, the opulent statues, the gilded pillars and the magnificent chandeliers. We moved on to the kalyan mantapa which had an entire structure that had been made in Scotland and brought here. Nothing, probably, made our jaw drop more than the sight of the howdah there that had around 80 kgs of gold decorating it!

But every silver lining has a dark cloud, or so it seems. As we started listening more keenly to the guides narrating the palace’s history, it dawned upon us that the original palace that had stood there had burned down in 1897 and this new one had been raised to replace it.

1897. It was a time when India was under colonial rule and there were upheavals occurring across the length and breadth of the country. It was a time when India had those kings who were doing something to fight the British and others who were puppets at the hands of the Raj and fed off the crumbs thrown at them from abroad. The ruler of Mysore belonged to the latter.

Suddenly, it all meant nothing. Not to me. Not to any of us. The gold around us lost its luster. The palace that had held us in awe till then no longer was anything more than sand, brick and metals.

Shakespeare’s ‘gilded tombs do worms infold’ had never been more true. Suddenly, all we wanted to do was get out of it.

We’d surprised ourselves. None of us had any idea we had even a fraction of the amount of patriotism we’d felt that day. Something just happened that made us feel we barely knew ourselves. Like they say, you never know… until you know.