Shangri-La

We’ve to run fast to catch up with this ever speeding world. We are repeatedly confronted by board-meetings, performance appraisals, year-ends, presentations, company sales, night-shifts, project deadlines… phew..!! To a mind which has been plagued by a bout of monotony and fatigue, the beauty of nature acts like rain on parched land. Man can see and feel the greatness of God only in the presence of nature. I’ve always been fascinated by nature. I prefer to learn lessons under the shade of a tree rather than inside an air-conditioned room. Hence I always yearn for green trees and greener pastures whenever the monotony of life was too much to bear. So one such day, I was reliving one of my trips to a very beautiful part of the country.

This stretch of land is very peculiar. It is not the hills not the coast not the river side and not the jungle. It is some special kind of a land that has a bit of everything. Another fact: This land which encompasses 3 districts has more than 5 languages being spoken. Yes..! you guessed it right..!

I’m talking about the land of Aishwarya Rai and Shilpa Shetty, pub girls and Shri Ram Sene, madhvacharya and kanakadasa, neer dosa and udupi cuisine. Welcome to Tulu Nadu, the banking capital of the country. I prefer to call it Karavali. This stretch of land wedged in between the two over-crowded tourist destinations of Goa and Kerala has never been on the itineraries of the tourists. While pilgrims do throng the various Hindu shrines scattered all over this wonderland, it is not as popular as its two siblings (I call them siblings because they share a very similar geography), Kerala and Goa. I’m simply spellbound by the natural beauty of Karavali. I don’t know why. J . Maybe it is something like my obsession with Bangalore. I’ve always liked the western coastal strip of our country. But the Karavali is quite very different from similar places like Kerala and Goa. I feel Goa is not too chaste and associated with booze and carefree life which makes it sacrilegious (at least to me). Kerala is too left and it irritates me a lot. Karavali offers no such disadvantages. :D. It is quite religious.

Here are a few pictures which i downloaded when i was browsing..

The sun-set at karwar, the capital of the northernmost district of the Karavali, Uttara Kannada.

the bridge across the river netravathi, in mangalore...