Hampi Quotes

I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and jumped when I turned and found Ren’s brother standing behind me as a man. Ren got up, alert, and watched him carefully, suspicious of Kishan’s every move. Ren’s tail twitched back and forth, and a deep grumble issued from his chest. Kishan look down at Ren, who had crept even closer to keep an eye on him, and then looked back at me. He reached out his hand, and when I placed mine in it, he lifted it to his lips and kissed it, then bowed deeply with great aplomb. “May I ask your name?” “My name is Kelsey. Kelsey hayes.” “Kelsey. Well, I, for one, appreciate all the efforts you have made on our behalf. I apologize if I frightened you earlier. I am,” he smiled, “out of practice in conversing with young ladies. These gifts you will be offering to Durga. Would you kindly tell me more about them?” Ren growled unhappily. I nodded. “Is Kishan your given name?” “My full name is actually Sohan Kishan Rajaram, but you can call me Kishan if you like.” He smiled a dazzling white smile, which was even more brilliant due to the contrast with his dark skin. He offered an arm. “Would you please sit and talk with me, Kelsey?” There was something very charming about Kishan. I surprised myself by finding I immediately trusted and liked him. He had a quality similar to his brother. Like Ren, he had the ability to set a person completely at ease. Maybe it was their diplomatic training. Maybe it was how their mother raised them. Whatever it was made me respond positively. I smiled at him. “I’d love to.” He tucked my arm under his and walked with me over to the fire. Ren growled again, and Kishan shot a smirk in his direction. I noticed him wince when he sat, so I offered him some aspirin. “Shouldn’t we be getting you two to a doctor? I really think you might need stitches and Ren-“ “Thank you, but no. You don’t need to worry about our minor pains.” “I wouldn’t exactly call your wounds minor, Kishan.” “The curse helps us to heal quickly. You’ll see. We’ll both recover swiftly enough on our own. Still, it was nice to have such a lovely young woman tending to my injuries.” Ren stood in front of us and looked like he was a tiger suffering from apoplexy. I admonished, “Ren, be civil.” Kishan smiled widely and waited for me to get comfortable. Then he scooted closer to me and rested his arm on the log behind my shoulders. Ren stepped right between us, nudged his brother roughly aside with his furry head, creating a wider space, and maneuvered his body into the middle. He dropped heavily to the ground and rested his head in my lap. Kishan frowned, but I started talking, sharing the story of what Ren and I had been through. I told him about meeting Ren at the circus and about how he tricked me to get me to India. I talked about Phet, the Cave of Kanheri, and finding the prophecy, and I told him that we were on our way to Hampi. As I lost myself in our story, I stroked Ren’s head. He shut his eyes and purred, and then he fell asleep. I talked for almost an hour, barely registering Kishan’s raised eyebrow and thoughtful expression as he watched the two of us together. I didn’t even notice when he’d changed back into a tiger.

The Uttarakhand BJP president declared similarly that pregnant women could avoid caesarean deliveries if they drank water from a river in the state.94 Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself claimed that India invented reproductive genetics and plastic surgery. In October 2014, he told a gathering of doctors and other professionals at a hospital in Mumbai: “We all read about Karna in the Mahabharata. If we think a little more, we realize that the Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at that time. That is why Karna could be born outside his mother’s womb. . . . We worship Lord Ganesha. There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery.”95 Remarks such as these were met each time with protestation from “rationalists,” a category of intellectuals often affiliated with the communist Left. Three of them, known for their criticism of Hindu nationalist sectarianism and obscurantism, were murdered between 2013 and 2015: Narendra Dabholkar, the founder of the Maharashtra Blind Faith Eradication Committee; Govind Pansare, a long-standing member of the Indian Communist Party; and M. M. Kalburgi, former vice-chancellor of Kannada University in Hampi96 (see chapter 7). For obscurantists (whether they belong to a religious sect or an ethnonationalist movement), rationalists are key targets because they are viewed as blasphemers and pose a threat to their belief system by exposing the myths in which they believe.

only person watching them. She’d noticed that before with Colin. At large dinners, people a few seats down would stop eating and lean over to listen to him. Colin left James, and a moment later he appeared beside her with a bottle of wine and glasses for her and her father. He kissed Faye, checked his watch, and said, “When can we ask them all to leave?” “Well,” said Deborah, once the guests were gone. “That was a success.” She had arranged for them to borrow her friend’s house in Provence for their honeymoon. “Actually,” Faye had said, “we’re going to India.” And on their honeymoon a week later, in a coracle spinning on a river in Hampi, Faye gripped the straw edges of the boat and she laughed and laughed and laughed. — AFTER THEY WERE MARRIED, my parents often went on trips abroad with his friends, to rented villas in France, Sardinia, Mallorca. I visited the one in Mallorca when I was twenty-two, after saving for months to buy the ticket. I went in September, when the villa where they’d stayed was empty. A sign for a security system was posted

At first the Hindus fought with success and nearly won the battle; but the issue was decided by the desertion of two Muslim commanders of Rama Raya's army, each in charge of seventy to eighty thousand men.

Indian Railways is the fourth largest rail network in the world These are the top 5 most luxurious trains which have the best beautiful views from the window of your seat and serve the best hospitality. These trains pass through beautiful places. Surely your experience will be at the next level. Maharajas' Express : It runs between October and April, covering around 12 destinations most of which lie in Rajasthan. Palace on Wheels: The train starts its journey from New Delhi and covers Jaipur, Sawai Madhopur, Chittorgarh, Udaipur, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, Bharatpur, and Agra, before returning to Delhi. If you plan on experiencing this royal journey, make sure you have Rs. 3,63,300 to spend! The Golden Chariot : you can take a ride along the Southern State of Karnataka and explore while living like a VIP on wheels. You start from Bengaluru and then go on to visit famous tourist attractions like Hampi, Goa and Mysore to name a few. The Golden Chariot also boasts of a spa, a gym and restaurants too. The Deccan Odyssey: The Deccan Odyssey can give you tours across destinations in Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Gujarat. It starts from Mumbai, covers 10 popular tourist locations including Ratnagiri, Sindhudurg, Goa, Aurangabad, Ajanta-Ellora Nasik, Pune, returning to Mumbai. Maha Parinirvan Express / Buddha Circuit Train: The Buddha Express travels through parts of Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, where Buddism originated over 2,500 years ago. This isn’t as opulent as the other luxury Indian trains and instead drops passengers off at hotels at famous tourist destinations such as Bodhgaya, Rajgir and Nalanda.

Nissarga” in Bangalore only to appear after about 58 hours at Bangalore Airport on 21st November 2005 and claim to the Vishakha Committee that she had gone to Hampi by an evening train when there was no train link between Bangalore and Hampi. That it was a white lie is borne from the fact that Ashima Neb had in her own handwriting stated in her “T.A. Bills” that

One of the first things you had to know was the difference between “In Coming” and “Out Going”.  The first loud noises or explosions we heard had everyone jumping and getting ready to run for the bunkers.  A loud voice in the darkness shouted for us to relax, it was “Out Going”.  The voice was referring to artillery fire being shot away from our location and hopefully onto a Viet Cong location.  It was normally referred to as an H&I fire (Harassing and Interdiction).  Another voice in the darkness asked, “What does in coming sound like?” The loud voice in the darkness answered, “There will be no doubt in your mind when you hear it.  If you don’t hear it, you will most likely be dead.

They speak of the triumph of the faith, the destruction of the idols and the temples, the loot, the carting away of the local people as slaves. … The architectural evidence—the absence of Hindu monuments in the north—is convincing enough. The conquest was unlike any that had gone before. There are no Hindu records of this period. Defeated people never write their history.’15 In the same interview, Naipaul argues that the Muslim conquerors succeeded in ‘the grinding down of Hindu India’. The loot and plunder and destruction, and their religious hostility to non-believers, was not restricted to the original foreign invaders, but a feature of the entire period of Islamic rule. He cites the example of Vijayanagara in this context. ‘Let us consider two last dates. In 1565, a year after the birth of Shakespeare, Vijayanagara in the south is destroyed and its great capital city (Hampi) laid waste. In 1592, the terrible Akbar ravages Orissa in the east. This means that while a country like England is preparing for greatness under its great Queen, old India in its sixth century of retreat, is still being reduced to non-entity. The wealth and creativity, the artisans and architecture of the kingdom of Vijayanagara and Orissa must have been destroyed, their lights put out.’16 Naipaul’s larger point is that such depredations dealt a body blow to the creative impulses of the Hindu civilisation. ‘This is where we come face to face with the Indian calamity. When places like Vijayanagara and Orissa were laid low, all the creative talent would also have been destroyed. The current was broken. We have no means of knowing what architecture existed in the north before the Muslims. We can only be certain that there would have been splendours like Konark and Kanchipuram.’17 In an article in the UK newspaper, the Guardian, writer-historian William Dalrymple attempts to rebut Naipaul’s outspoken views. Naipaul’s ‘jaundiced’ view, he argues, was due to the influence of the ‘imperial historiography of Victorian Britain’, where the British sought to paint the Muslims as plunderers to bring out their own ‘civilizing mission’. Vijayanagara, he says, was ‘heavily Islamicised by the sixteenth century’. This can be inferred by the fact that ‘the Hindu kings of Vijayanagara appeared in public audience, not bare-chested as had been the tradition in Hindu India, but dressed in quasi-Islamic court costume’, symbolic, according to him—on the authority of American Sanskrit scholar, Philip Wagner—‘of their participation in the more universal culture of Islam’.

Vijayanagara had adopted ‘many of the administrative, tax-collecting, and military methods of the Muslim sultans that surrounded it—namely, stirrups, horse-shoes, horse armour, and a new type of saddle’. Its architecture also showed evidence of the use ‘of the arch and the dome of the Islamic north’.15 Reciprocally, Hindu influences were also discernible in the Islamic sultanates, with whom the Vijayanagara kingdom on occasion entered into strategic alliances. I am not, however, clear what these arguments prove. Because the kings of Vijayanagara did not appear bare-chested in public, or because they used stirrups or horseshoes, and because, where they felt politically necessary, they aligned themselves with one Muslim sultanate to finesse the other, was Vijayanagara not a Hindu kingdom? Or that, when it was defeated, the Muslim sultans did not savagely destroy the city and, in particular, attack its remarkable temples? To quote a few instances of Hindu–Muslim syncretism in architecture, in dress or in administrative practices, is more an acknowledgement of the unavoidable fusions wrought over centuries, and not a change in the mindset of Muslim conquerors against kafirs and their practice of destroying Hindu cultural and religious artefacts. It is a moot point too whether the Vijayanagara kings, on conquering a Muslim sultanate, would have as relentlessly destroyed mosques. Historical records clearly bring out that Krishnadevaraya (1509–1528 CE)—the most illustrious ruler of Vijayanagara and among the greatest kings India has seen—respected all faiths. He was himself a Vaishnavite, but extended wholehearted patronage to Shaiva, Jain and other sects. He employed Muslims in his army, encouraged them to settle in the capital city and erected a mosque in 1439 for them to pray. For the Muslim officers in his court, he placed a copy of the Koran before his throne so that they could perform the ceremony of obeisance before him without sinning against their religious injunctions, even though the Vijayanagara kingdom was formed with the aim of protecting Hindus and Hindu culture from Muslim attacks. Christian Portuguese also found residence in the capital. The Portuguese traveller, Barbosa, who visited Hampi during Krishnadevaraya’s rule, wrote: ‘The king allows such freedom that every man may come and go and live according to his own creed, without suffering any annoyance and without enquiry whether