I used to be quite a traveler, from London to Moscow, but I hadn’t considered India, until some friends of mine returned from a trip where they stayed in one of the many five star hotels in Bangalore. Their raves about the good time they had made me fire up the computer and take a look at satellite maps of the area, and reviewing all the material I could about the area they just left. Bangalore certainly seemed a fascinating place, filled with history and amazing architecture, including the Bangalore Palace and the Nandi Temple.
Hard to believe that about 472 years ago, Bangalore was a mud built fort, and today it’s India’s third largest city, and it’s still growing! As of 2009, it has a population of about 5.8 million. People call this place the Garden City of India, and you certainly tell from satellite photos that it’s true because of so many public parks like Cubbon Park.
Bangalore Palace caught my attention because it’s modeled after Windsor Castle just outside London. Get this: It was started by a high school principal, and took eighty-two years to build!
Then there’s Nandi Temple, built five hundred years ago. The story behind the temple also begins five hundred years ago. At that time, villagers harvested ground nuts and every day there was a full Moon, the nuts vanished. The villagers decided to stake out the area and discovered a huge golden bull with jewel-like eyes eating their crop! Afterwards, the bull no longer came to their farm. But, later, they found a huge idol of a bull appear on the hill, and the idol kept growing. They hit the idol with a nail to stop its growth. Soon after, Kempe Gowda, the ruler who laid out the foundation for Bangalore City, had a dream, in which a Nandi appeared and asked that a temple be built on the hill. That’s Nandi Temple, which contains a huge Nandi idol (fifteen feet high and twenty feet long). At the foot of hill there’s another temple for Dodda Ganapathy (another huge idol, ten feet high by fifteen feet wide), and another temple for Lord Siva above that temple.
I began reading about the temple in November, and as it happens, the ground nut fair, known as the Kadalekay Parishe, is celebrated each year on the last Monday of the Kaarthigai month, and this usually happens in November! I saw an article say that farmers believe they’ll enjoy a good harvest if they pray to Nandi on this day. It suggested that those who can’t visit the festival eat a few ground nuts that day. I wasn’t sure exactly what day the festival fell on, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get there this year, but just the same, I went to the kitchen to see if I had some walnuts or almonds to eat.