The following post could hurt feelings of certain communities. Reader's discretion is advised.
Jan 2012: Golden Temple, Amritsar. Never before in my life had I experienced such calm and serenity at an extremely crowded place. I happened to visit this historic and religious place with my friends last January. We walked around the temple admiring the historic structure. Another point to note here is that there are not seperate price based queues. I could not understand the Kirtans but I got soaked in the music and felt a calm, an inner peace. Though the number of devotees visiting the temple was huge, everyone moved in a disciplined manner without pushing and shoving other devotees which is quite common a sight in crowded places in India. Everyone was silently praying rather than shouting at top of their voices. The movement in the crowd itself was quite peaceful. Actually it was us who were blabbering about different things we observed around. But we too became quite as mark of respect to the temple and the devotees around. Rather I would say, it was the positive energy around us that made us behave. Another important observation was that the activities in the temple were carried out by volunteers with utmost devotion. People involved in crowd management and distributing prasad were all volunteers. And there is a free kitchen, where thousands of devotees are fed at a time. Here too it is the volunteers who were at the helm of affairs. In the period between entering and leaving the Gurudwara, my respect for the Sikh religion and Sikh community grew by leaps and bounds.
Jun 2012: Golden Temple, Vellore. I visited this place with my family. As we entered, there were multiple price-based queues, with free queue being the longest maze. We wanted to have a quick visit, so we took VIP tickets and entered the complex. The path to and around the temple was in shape of a star. The pathway was quite wide and could easily accommodate many people at a time. This puzzled me as lot of people were waiting in the free queue for a long time. I realized that it is one of the ways to create an artificial crowd. The lawns inside were well kept and maintained and could easily substitute for a public park but no one is allowed onto the lawns. As we entered the pathway, we were forced to walk through a commercial complex set up by the temple management.There were another set of shops we were forced to visit when we were leaving the complex. Anyway we ignored the shops and moved ahead to have darshan. After we had darshan and were coming out of the sanctum santorum, we were soon encountered by uniformed personnel who were sitting in front of computers with a big board of donation schemes beside them. But as we ignored them and moved ahead, we were pursued by them audaciously for quite a while for donations. They only backed out when they were given an earful. Another eyesore, was the blatant publicity of the self-styled godman through posters and hoardings, who had built this temple. Overall the experience was bad for us and it was unfortunate for us to witness blatant mockery of an ancient religion by godmen and their cohorts. Such kind of setup and practices in temples will either turn away devotees from the religion or breed corruption in a community where religion is a mainstay of life.
Jan 2012: Golden Temple, Amritsar. Never before in my life had I experienced such calm and serenity at an extremely crowded place. I happened to visit this historic and religious place with my friends last January. We walked around the temple admiring the historic structure. Another point to note here is that there are not seperate price based queues. I could not understand the Kirtans but I got soaked in the music and felt a calm, an inner peace. Though the number of devotees visiting the temple was huge, everyone moved in a disciplined manner without pushing and shoving other devotees which is quite common a sight in crowded places in India. Everyone was silently praying rather than shouting at top of their voices. The movement in the crowd itself was quite peaceful. Actually it was us who were blabbering about different things we observed around. But we too became quite as mark of respect to the temple and the devotees around. Rather I would say, it was the positive energy around us that made us behave. Another important observation was that the activities in the temple were carried out by volunteers with utmost devotion. People involved in crowd management and distributing prasad were all volunteers. And there is a free kitchen, where thousands of devotees are fed at a time. Here too it is the volunteers who were at the helm of affairs. In the period between entering and leaving the Gurudwara, my respect for the Sikh religion and Sikh community grew by leaps and bounds.
Jun 2012: Golden Temple, Vellore. I visited this place with my family. As we entered, there were multiple price-based queues, with free queue being the longest maze. We wanted to have a quick visit, so we took VIP tickets and entered the complex. The path to and around the temple was in shape of a star. The pathway was quite wide and could easily accommodate many people at a time. This puzzled me as lot of people were waiting in the free queue for a long time. I realized that it is one of the ways to create an artificial crowd. The lawns inside were well kept and maintained and could easily substitute for a public park but no one is allowed onto the lawns. As we entered the pathway, we were forced to walk through a commercial complex set up by the temple management.There were another set of shops we were forced to visit when we were leaving the complex. Anyway we ignored the shops and moved ahead to have darshan. After we had darshan and were coming out of the sanctum santorum, we were soon encountered by uniformed personnel who were sitting in front of computers with a big board of donation schemes beside them. But as we ignored them and moved ahead, we were pursued by them audaciously for quite a while for donations. They only backed out when they were given an earful. Another eyesore, was the blatant publicity of the self-styled godman through posters and hoardings, who had built this temple. Overall the experience was bad for us and it was unfortunate for us to witness blatant mockery of an ancient religion by godmen and their cohorts. Such kind of setup and practices in temples will either turn away devotees from the religion or breed corruption in a community where religion is a mainstay of life.
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