Kalale after 7 years and Unbelievable Bangalore-Mysore Highway!

This weekend was an awesome one...everything went fine as planned! After a long 6-7 years, i visited my dad's village 'Kalale', around 4 kms from the Nanjangud town, which in turn is 25kms from Mysore city. It is the time of the 10-day festival / Jatra in the village and saturday, 18th March 2006 was the day for the grand Kalale Rathothsava / Kalale Ther!!! Me and my cousin-bro started off from Bangalore on friday evening @ 1745hrs in his car...We took the banagalore-mysore highway, the new 4-lane road with a 2mtr divider in between the road making it one-way on either side! The road is awesome and you can move in breathtaking speed (we drove at the speed of 120-130kmph!!!) and i stongly feel this is the ONLY good job (on the infrastructure front) the government has done! :) Its the kind of worth the wait for this type of beautiful road...The most happiest person to drive on this road will be our good old KSRTC drivers, who would have gone thru hell for so long years...now, they are enjoying the ride and the driving...:)

So, with that said speed, we reached Mysore @ 2015hrs...a good 2.5 hrs journey with 15mins break in the MTR Sivhalli restuarant to have Dosa and Coffee! :) Once this highway completes fully, i think we can reach mysore in 2hrs flat, with a speed of 100kmph in the car! (I hope by this year's Dasara celebrations, this road will be pukka clean from Bangalore till Mysore...Right now, work is going on the various bridges front...so, out of 140kms, around 10-15kms might be pending!) One more thing! the road has comeup so well that i could not recognize the Mandya-Mysore 45kms stretch, on which i travelled for almost an year during my engineering college days! U can imagine how nice the road might be...:) After reaching mysore and my cousin-bro's house, we took rest for sometime and then went out to see our good old Palace city! The Gokulam area, the KRS road, the Dhanvantri road, the Railway station, the Sayyaji-Rao road, the KR Circle, the Palace, the Devaraj Urs road, the world famous Crawford Hall (seat of University of Mysore - i hold my BE degree from this univ!), the awesome and wide Law court road, the never-gonna-change Jayanagar area (my grandma stays there, in a 80 year old house!), the now-bit-posh Kuvempunagar area, the ManasaGangotri (campus of the University of Mysore!), the hip-hop Kalidasa road and VV Maholla, the superb-never-forgettable Jayalakshmipuram area (me and my family stayed for 2 years in this area) and back to Brindavan extension! Huh...this is all about mysore...covers 50-60% of this good, peace giving, unpollutioned, Palace city!!! I love it, love more than this Bangalore!!!!!!!!!! :) Anyways, back to my visit to the village Kalale (main purpose of this trip!), we started from mysore on saturday, the day of the Ther, @ 0530hrs and reached Kalale @ 0615hrs, via the town of Nanjangud. Its always nice to go to a village and spend some time there, taking break from this concrete jungle and ur mechanical routine life... My relatives were all happy that i turned up after this long time...The great, old time temple, seat of Lord Lakshmikantha Swamy (and the main attraction of this day as the Ther means to place the god on a wooden charriot and then, roam around the village once)...This happened at around 0830hrs and it was superb...I, along with thousand of other people who had gathered for this, pulled the 30 feet wooden charriot in which the Lord was placed...it was very nice feeling...

After this, we had the tiffin and then we were free by 1000hrs...we had to wait till lunch before we return back to blr. So, we thought of visiting the world famous Nanjangud Nanjundeshwara temple...what a temple man! its very huge and apart from the main deity Lord Shiva/Nanjundeshwara, many other gods and goddess are seated here...its a very big and a nice temple and Thank god! its neatly maintained!!

After an hour, we returned back to the village and then post lunch (amazing lunch!), we left to Bangalore by 1515hrs and reached blr by 1900hrs, with a 15mins break in MTR again! :)

All in all, it was a wonderful and much needed break and a day to store and remember in memory!!!