A few years ago, amidst ancient caves and temples and erotic sculpture, I heard the siren call of this other place, more womb-like, receptive, welcoming, offering warmth, rest. Perhaps, nourishment for the soul as well.
I had been travelling around India, exploring our cultural heritage; but I found myself being drawn not to places of artistic or historic interest, but to those located on a more spiritual map, though it was hard for me to define what exactly ‘spiritual’ was at the time. They were sites of pilgrimage, real places that the senses could grasp, real communities of real people living together. Places that beckoned from a strange conjuncture of the physical and metaphysical.
There are dance sessions, musical performances, other celebratory, social events. But the meditations, all day long, beginning at five in the morning, provide the pull toward something inward. Perhaps it is the toughest kind of ashram to be in; its socialising, good food and easy chatter make it so easy to reproduce just the pattern one might have come here to forget, or to put aside, and instead lead to the quest for cooler and more hip forms of spirituality.
(This story appears in the 17 July, 2009 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)