Statue of the same preacher in the shavtamber sect of Jain religion ( different temple)
Today was the day of friends and fun. Our friends from the engineering college had arranged a get together and a picnic at a local Jain Temple in Indore. There were about 60 to 70 people who showed up with very little notice . Most of them were Jagdish’s class mates and few mine. It was a full day of talk , talk and more talk. Most enjoyable part for me was the old funny songs sung by Tapan Mukherji and our new relative Dilip Kawathekar. They are both amazing performers and entertained for over an hour with all sorts of fun songs. Tapan and I shared an office at the engineering college for three years. He is an excellent teacher, great industrialist and an amazing entertainer. He is very involved with youth here and is known as Tapan Dada. I hope to get him interested in the Explorabox also. If you like a sample of his song, I will try to figure out how to upload a video
The Jain Temple is situated on a small hill and has great statues of their divine preachers , beautiful setting and a nice view. A little about Jain religion: It's origin is dated somewhere between 9 th to 6th century BC before the Aryan’s came to India. It has a series of 24 preachers who teach a way of complete NON VIOLANCE towards ALL living things. The religion later got divided into several sects ( like all other religions do) . One sect, Digumbers, believe that the preachers did not wear clothes and do not adore their statues with anything. The other sect: Shavtambers are not so picky and decorate their gods wit clothes as well as give them human features and make up ( see the difference in the two statues of the same god) The Jain temples are typically at a naturally beautiful place and are very clean. The Jains , although a minority in India , are rich and powerful people devoted to building big and beautiful temples.
In the evening we went for a walk and had a nice dinner in a garden restaurant, “celebrity” and got another session of live music concert at the Residency Club. This was some famous sisters and the music was great. But, I thought the songs sung by Tapan and Dilip were more emotionally touching . Their presence , and fun way of singing was really heart warming and brought back lots of good memories.
I feel very blessed to have such wonderful friends even after 35 years of leaving the college. Good night and p to try to listen to the songs, they are precious.( but in hindi) …good night saroj
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