This was my second visit to Maharashtra after 43 long years and the first pilgrimage to Shirdi. A quintessential experience, insofar as it warranted disengagement from the daily chores and cares for existence and the virtues of procrastination as an empowering means to repose and reflect.
I took the Jet Konnect flight, and even the aeriel view of the city showed Aurungabad as a progressive, as well as a heritage and culturally rich city, with major automobile, pharmaceutical and other service sector multinationals setting base here. The Chikkalthana Airport of Aurungabad, where our flight landed, is state-of-the-art, yet compact airport with modern passenger handling amenities. The city is dotted with numerous hotels that are very clean, hospitable and offering sumptuous meals at very reasonable rates. In fact far more reasonable than what we are used to in north India. The dark soil of the state of Maharashtra that we criss-crossed for over 800 kms, is very fertile and besides the highways one can buy clean refreshing and very reasonably priced sugarcane juice, onions and observe the traditional farming practices that have preserved the nutrition of the soil. The trucks on the highways drove in a far more civilised manner than what one is accustomed to seeing in north India. The people are far more docile and down to earth in this state.
In the 4 days of whirlwind tours, I came across multitudes of Indians and fellow Hindus. This was a tour where unquestioning faith was supreme. Every day lakhs of devotees would ungrudging subject themselves to hours of waiting in serpentine queues, following methods that were not changed or reinvented for decades.
The caves at Ajant and Ellora needed to be better preserved. This was all the more tragic because as a civilisation that had built monolithic structures, carved out in the metamorphic rocks with only muscle power and the ascetic will of a scientifically working mind, long before the Western world was civilized with the sciences and arts of construction and building.
However, the month of April being too hot, but for the well air-conditioned and hospitable accommodation, and the reasonably priced taxi service, this trip would have only been half as joyous as it was for us.