Nandi

 

Sometime after I'd finished illustrating my first picture book, I felt rather lost as one does after completing an intense project. I mentioned this to a young friend and she encouraged me to Google adventure groups to see what they had to offer. One such group, Unventured, offered a bike ride around the base of Nandi Hills. If you grew up in Bangalore, you'd have invariably taken a trip or more to Nandi Hills, reached the top, lolled around a bit and then driven back, but the base of Nandi Hills is not exactly a tourist attraction so I was intrigued. I enlisted.

This is probably one of the most memorable adventures I've ever had. Apart from me and the guide, the others who enlisted were two women in their twenties, both software engineers visiting Bangalore, one from the US and the other from Singapore. We were taken in an Innova to the a farmhouse at Nandi Village, fed a sumptuous breakfast and then given our cycles. It had been at least 15 years since I'd ridden one but I did my stuff. It was a glorious Sunday morning when we rode the empty streets of Nandi Village. We were shown a silk-making unit, tried our hands on a potters wheel, taken to one of the most beautiful temples I had ever seen and most memorable of all, shown this beautiful old colonial railway station pictured above.

These villagers below at the railway station posed solemnly in attention, as villagers always tend to do for a photograph.

I decided to walk back to the farmhouse through the village. Below are my cycling companions passing me by and a glimpse of Nandi Hills in the background.

Village house

The village barber

Silk worm Cocoons!

The Temple selfie

The colour of my sneakers

I was determined to revisit Nandi and sketch the colonial railway station, so a few years later, I took a train from Cantonment Railway station to Nandi.

Here is the colour of some of the trains in this country. Embellished to the hilt.

I got off at the Colonial Railway station and crossed the tracks to get a better view to sketch. The Army was conducting an exercise close to where we sat. Seeing us sitting on the ground and drawing, they brought as a table and chairs and a couple of glasses of fresh lime juice. It was so kind of them!

It turned out that the train departed from the colonial station back to Bangalore only at 7pm so I walked through Nandi village and saw scenes like the one below - a cauliflower patch!

I revisited and explored the temple, took an auto into a small town nearby and thanks to the fact that I spoke Kannada, found and paid for a taxi ride back home. Coming to Nandi cost me something like ₹50 if I remember right, but returning by taxi cost me over a 1000 bucks. However, there are some adventures that are worth it. Perhaps I'll go there again.

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Priya Sebastian
#priyasebastian