sajith | Up north, in the Chalukya HQ.

Sidharth (alright,

mat_attack), Vivek and I had been to Badami, Pattadakal and Aihole a weekend back. We strayed about, moved around in creaky-jumpy vans and buses, gawked at temple ~~porn~~ art, drank beer, did not watch the adult movie in a local cinema hall as planned, drank some more beer, speculated a bit about life back then when kings were kings and the rest were mere losers, hatched plans for Sid's upcoming Booker and Filmfare winners, and had an overall good time. Children and sometimes adults (even the infamous Badami monkeys, I would say) came to me asking to be photographed, and so the LCD preview came much handy. (Now that is truly something to appreciate about digital.) These are my people and I love them to bits for their generosity. However I now have the problem of ending up with too many pictures. It's aggravated by these places being such that every nook, corner, cranny and stone has a story.

As always, I regret going there with little homework. (Not even a cursory glance on related wikipedia articles, imagine that.) Badami and whereabouts are not as touristy as the neighbouring Hampi (notable is the nearly total absence of souvenir shops and guides), so the plan to buy a guide book and do some instant research did not work. So it happens that we just have not explored or appreciated the place well enough. But as always, there should be a next time when we would do this Better^TM, correcting our past mistakes.

Now that I'm distant and going through the pictures, everything about Badami is beautiful. Even the ubiquitous stray pigs wallowing in drains are beautiful. The complete (beautiful!) picture dump is here, if you happen to have some time and patience. Thanks already!