mahabalipuram

just by chance i visited the UNESCO world heritage centre web site, and it quickly struck, unknowingly till now i have visited 6 out of the 21 cultural sites in india declared as world heritage by UNESCO.

the 6th site i visited was not even a month ago. we* went to watch a movie in a theatre some 25 km out of CHENNAI city. foote karum hamare, the show was already “sold out”. now what? our motto in life is simple “AAYA HU TO KUCH KARKE JAOONGA”; we did not think twice, we bought the evening show tickets. however our satisfaction didn’t last long, we soon realized it was another 3 hours before the evening show starts. so we decided to go further 28 km to “MAHABALIPURAM”!!

we*: myself, nilay and nilay’s horse (his lml vespa scooter).

“MAHABALIPURAM” was a port city of the south indian dynasty of the PALLAVAS. it has various historic monuments built largely between the 7th and the 9th century. awesome, that means those monuments were around 1200 years old. this was the oldest of all the other 5 sites i have seen.

it was amazing to see all the monuments were mostly rock-cut and monolithic!! with one site of these monuments, in an instant i felt myself roaming in the 7th century. some relief’s depicted scenes of day to day activities they performed, like milking the cows. i also observed on many of the relief’s, the way the people dressed themselves. each pillar I saw was beautifully carved and each set of pillars having a unique design. it was sometimes difficult to even distinguish between 2 pillars of the same set. i thought it was sheer SKILL. it would have been done with proper calculations, with planning, with perfection, and with patience. one thing i was pondering about was, the room for error while carving a monolithic structure, and I knew it very well, it was close to a ZERO! i thought deeper; whenever I draw a figure on a canvas i have the liberty of erasing my errors and redrawing the figure. and i was awestruck with the thought that you cannot erase your mistakes on a monolithic structure!! i was beginning to appreciate and understand the meaning of the word “SKILL”, i was imagining a big rock, 15-20 meters high with a diameter of 15-20 meters, i could define that rock in one word too and it was “HUGE”, with 20 sculptors working on the same rock carving 10 elephants on it, and imagine one elephant figure going wrong!! the result, as i thought was either discard that rock, take a new “HUGE” rock and start from scratch or change the design on the same rock, which calls for complete rework and may not be feasible in certain cases. isn’t “SKILL” very important? i thought. the other aspect which touched my mind was, the amount of patience and time required to do such work.

the shore temple was one of the monuments about which i can write endlessly. it has got a perfect background, the BAY OF BENGAL sea. it appears reddish-brown most probably because of the reddish rock they used to carve the temple, or might be due to passage of time. i peeped through a small opening on the locked temple door, eager to see the idols, it was difficult to identify things in the dark initially, but I could make out, it was a relief depicting lord SHIVA and PARVATI. as soon as I turned, a woman sitting in front of the door said “its 1300 years old” and she was damn proud of it, i replied her with a smile.

it is difficult for me to describe in words the beauty and history those monuments carry.

it was already evening and we were on our way back to the theatre to catch the movie. all the way i still had the monuments at the back of my mind, i was thinking, can we build such monuments now? can we spend so much of time? do we have the patience? do we have space to build such things? why are such precious monuments unattended? why don’t we worship these artistic monuments rather than the idols in those monuments? are we trying to educate people of such a great history?

we entered the theatre, the movie had already started, we struggled in the dark but somehow reached our seats. the movie scene pinched me and i was brought back from the 7th century to the 21st century. we were watching a helicopter chase in the movie “MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 3”.