Outdoor

O Holy Ride

Nagesh Baitadiya and Amit Bandre get away from the madding crowd for a ‘spiritual’ experience. They tell Aditi Dharmadhikari about their ride to Kanifnath

Aditi Dharmadhikari

Posted On Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 08:34:45 PM

Stone arches of the temple

Every alternate weekend brings with it a sense of anticipation. Road trips are a novelty for us, of which we treasure every moment and revving up our bikes and setting off into the ghats every fortnight has become tradition.

This weekend, we had our hearts set on Mandhar devi, near Bhor, and we when we left from home at the crack of dawn we were all pumped up with enthusiasm for the day that lay ahead.

However, high hopes have a habit of coming crashing down on us, and just when the morning chill had begun to make the tips of our fingers and noses cold, one of our bikes broke down near City Pride on Satara Road.

Nikhil, to whom that bike belonged, was at the receiving end of many elaborate Marathi shivya. But everything said and done, we aren’t the type of people to give up so easy, are we?

Undaunted, we got him behind someone on another bike and had a little

Site of the break down

group huddle in the middle of the road. Going back home was not an option, so we opted for a change in destination: Kanifnathgad, near Saswad was to be our next stop!

About an hour’s ride away, Kanifnathgad is famous for the temple at its peak, the temple of Kanifnath. We prayed to him throughout our ride over the winding roads through the ghats to bless us with some rainfall to lift our spirits, but to no avail (this is why our next road trip is going to be to a temple for the rain gods).

Myth has it that the entrance to the sanctum sanctorum(gabhara) of the Kanifnath temple has dimensions measuring one and a half foot for each side, but that any man with enough faith in Kanifnath could fit through it, no matter how rotund.

We were all, obviously, very skeptical and we went armed with one very well-fed friend of ours. To our amazement, all of us fit through it with ease (albeit with a little bit of tricky angling) and admired the elaborately decorated samadhi inside that little chamber.

We stopped at a little place for misal pav on the way back,

Relaxing after a long ride

a staple for every mini-journey like this one.

Our fun weekend road trip had been a little more unpredictable than we had imagined, but we wait for the next one with trepidation all the same.

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O Holy Ride

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