Of This and That

The Swaminarayan Hindu Temples were started by Swaminarayan, as part of his Swaminarayan sampraday and promote his philosophy of belief in God and idol worship. The most known and fascinating attribute of any Swaminarayan temple is the architecture, and in many cases, the overall construction spread across acres of land. These temples are not just in India but are found worldwide . We recently visited the one in Pune at Narhe and true to its name, this one is also beautifully made. If coming from Mumbai side, after your cross Warje and the Sinhgadh road, you take the Katraj bypass going towards Bengaluru. Continue for about 2 kms and take the side road. This road is narrow and that means traffic could build up here. This road eventually crosses over the highway on the other side, taking right to the Swaminarayan temple. You do need to go right and then left, towards the parking, which is huge. That said, there is bound to be additional rush on weekends and festivals, so you may ...

Come long weekend and the trend these days is that you need to be going out with family for the long weekend trip. However this also means that one has to make the bookings well in advance as otherwise usually nothing much is available at the last min. For the 26 th Jan weekend, we did realize a bit late and unfortunately as expected, didn't get any bookings anywhere. Spending the 3 days at home, wasn't making any sense, so we decided to rather make do with day trips so that we don’t have to stay anywhere. With this intention in mind, we looked up Rajaram’s PlacesNearPune blog site, and like in past, I did find options near Pune that were within 30-40 km range. The first was the Kodit Maskoba temple and the other was the Kanifnath temple . Both are on Pune Saswad road and hence easily doable in a single day trip. Given that many temples tend to close during noon, we decided to start early in the day so that we get sufficient time to spend in the temple, but the g...