Land of Melas and Brooms

     It happens every time I travel out to the countryside. I go for some purpose and always end up finding something totally unexpected. Sometimes fascinating. It happened today again and I'm so excited about it that even though I've to wake up at 4.00 am tomorrow morning, I'm driven enough to finally open a blog and put down what I saw.

     There is this small Mela, which receives about 50,000 odd people which takes place at Kartik Poornima every year. I'm ashamed to say that although it takes place in my area and it started today, I had no clue about it till someone else told me about it. I finished up the work I was bogged down all day with and rushed to the place. Cruising along the highway, half hour later we swerve left into a smaller road going downwards. It was only then that I realised that this was actually a mildly hilly tract. Drove another five minutes and we pass by a curious sign board attached to a gate saying 'The Desert Museum'. I wondered who may thought of putting up a Museum on the road to a small village, so far from the City and made a note to try and drop in.

     We went further down, right up to the Mela spot. Took a walk along the main road, absorbing the place. This Mela attracts mainly local crowds, but quite a number of them even from far off villages. Buses packed inside out, people walking up to the tiny temple enjoying the sights of puppeteers and chewing tons of popcorn. It seriously amazed me how many popcorn sellers there were. The temple's perched atop a small hillock, with water flowing under it, in which they all will take a holy dip. This is believed to be a perennial spring but interestingly, this year the Gram Panchayat actually filled it up with water transported from elsewhere!

     After chatting with the guys on duty and the Sarpanch, we started our journey back. This time we stopped at that curious Museum. It turns out that this is a Museum of Brooms!! Despite being here for a while, I had never heard of it and I have to admit, I am thrilled to bits with my discovery. Incidentally, the person who runs it was there himself this evening and I got a nice round of the place. This 10 acres of land, developed by an NGO which works of study and preservation of local folk lore, was beautifully built and maintained. All strutures are made in the traditional way that village used to be. The Brooms are categorized according to the food zones that the State can be broken into. They were put up in small huts fashioned as real rooms in a village house. The house itself was completely rural: grooves women make on the plaster of the outside wall with their fingers, utensil stand made of horse dung and clayey soil mixture, grain bins made with donkey dung and clayey soil, the works!

     Outside, we walk a short distance to a large stone serving as a bench. It overlooked a large body of water, almost like a pond. It turns out that it used to be a mining pit, now deserted. They had developed the pit and now used it to store water. I sat there, watching the myriad birds that the water attracted. The breathtaking sunset melted away my tiredness, as it did the day. A few moments and then I had to be off. But this one unexpected little find turned a day fraught with deadlines and dog work into a happy ending. Definitely going to return there soon.