Staying in Bangalore and not visiting Mysore is quite unimaginable, or that is what I thought. I decided to take my friend, who has recently shifted to Bangalore, for a day-trip on Good Friday’s weekend. But the visit to the City of Palace was a little less than a disaster!
Three to four years back, a day trip to Mysore was like visiting a haven for the daily-harassed Bangalorean, with lots of greeneries, lovely locales, and of course the un-missable Mysore Palace and Vrindavan Gardens. But the actual visit to the “must-visit” city took me more by shock than surprise.
We left at 7am and wanted to cover as much as possible in the day. We hired a car with AC, which was the one good decision we took, or else the scorching heat and the excessive sweat would have left us dehydrated to the bone by the end of the day.
The trip started with a whirlwind tour of Srirangapatna, just 20 km before Mysore. We went to the Sriranganathaswamy temple, followed by a visit to the spot where Lord Wellesley found the body of the great Tipu who fell to a bullet from the British soldiers, led on to Sangam, Gol Gombuz, and Meenaxi Temple. These three were at a distance of 2-3 km of each other but what struck us most was, with each stop we took, we had to shell out 20 bucks for parking. Money plays a great role these days, the toll gates, entry fees, extra charges for camera, in fact at Mysore Palace, we noticed that entry fees for foreigners are exactly 10 times to what we are paying!!!
Understandable, India is trying to promote its “incredibility” to it visitors but not to the extent that you literally exploit them. The veil of the age-old welcome feeling India used to give is lifting up. Commercialization is taking a toll on the actual beauty and pleasure of a tour.
“Sir, you have to pay here to enter the mosque”, “Two rupees per person to keep your shoes”, “The charge is 100 rupees to take your still camera in and 200 if you have a video camera”, “Pay 10 rupees for queue-less special entry to the temple”, “Three rupees for you to pose and I’ll click your picture in your camera”! These are some of the sentences we heard throughout the day.
True, maintenance cost is required for all the sites, but aren’t these trusts given enough funds by the tourism department to take care of the relics? The tourists are here to savor the beauty, learn about the lost heritage, relax and be carefree. Instead, it is more of a pain because one has to prepare so much beforehand that the whole anticipation is lost.
I know I digressed from the topic but the frustration was too much to hide. Getting back to Mysore, the first and possibly the tallest church I have ever visited personally, the Philomena’s Church was our first destination. Everything about the structure was grand, including more than 5000 name plaques that have been engraved in the walls of the catacomb. We didn’t enter Mysore Palace because of the sheer swarm of people. Instead we took a walk along the perimeter of the palace and had some of the best views of eagles swooping around the spires of the domes.
Then it was the turn to visit Chamundi Hills, which was quite a peaceful visit with nice views from the temple. On our way to the Vrindavan Gardens, we halted at the Karanji Kere Lake, which is right adjacent to the Mysore Zoo and a paradise with some amazing species of migratory birds. That half-an-hour was probably the most peaceful and quiet time of our whole trip. We had intended to make a half-an-hour trip to the Vrindavan Gardens, which turned out to be an hour due to one-way traffic diversions and of course the heavy traffic. The garden itself didn’t look less than a seasonal fair, a thousand plus cars, no parking area left and a maddening shoveling inside to move around.
I’ll suggest if you are keen to visit Mysore, go on a weekday. And don’t forget to carry cash since we had a tough time searching for an ATM which actually dispensed money.
We finally made our way out and reached home around 12.30 midnight. A journey of 380 km in one day, the heat, and the traffic squeezed out all our energy and we had dozed off even before our heads hit the pillow!
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