Surprise Ganesh

You will find temples of all shapes and sizes in Bangalore and throughout India. Some times they make sense – like the Bull Temple on the top of a mountain. Some times they make you wonder, like the small truck size temple which seems to be located in the middle of a lane of traffic. (I presume the temple predates the road, but I’m not entirely sure…). And some time they surprise you. Like when your kid brother or sister hides somewhere then pops out unexpectedly to say “boo”! That seems like what the giant Ganesh was playing at when we spotted him in the middle of nowhere yesterday.

We were driving through a seemingly suburban neighborhood visiting nurseries when out the car window, i spotted the elephant-headed god himself, sitting above his own fancy swimming pool filled with lotus, and covered by a strong, permanent sun awning. We stumbled upon the secret and mysterious Ganesh Kalyani temple (although perhaps only secret and mysterious to me ).

C wasn’t nearly as excited as I was by the out-of-place temple, but he was born and raised here; I imagine he has seen it often. He did concede that more and more modern houses have been built around this area in the last 10 years, which makes Ganesh’s location seem a little incongruent today.

Apparently no one swims in the tank — the generic term for this pool and other man made water reservoirs. C mentioned the presence of locus blooms. I seem to recall that locus only blooms in dirty water, but I follow up on that.

At first I was taken aback that nurseries would park their trucks on the banks of the pool. It seemed to ruin the purity of the temples and its sight line . But you know, in part that may be helping to keep the secret.

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