Melkote

Hill town. Ancient Temples. Picturesque views. Rice based delicacies. Ruins. Sanskrit University. Rural landscape.

Melukote or Melkote literally means upper fort. However there’s nothing military about this today. It’s known as a temple town for its small community of ‘Iyengars’, two temples, a sanskrit university and picturesque ruins.

That’s putting it in concise words. A tour is a different experience in itself. On the way to Mysore, the road detours off into a small street through sugarcane fields. Going uphill enjoy lovely countryside views of Mandya.

On the top, the town emerges as a mix of old & new architectures. Small homes, narrow lanes, awesome sweet & spicy rice dishes – the ‘Sakkare Pongal & Puliogare’ – in simple small hotels, vast temple with enchanting stories weaved around it, the quaint sanskrit college that painstakingly digitised archaic palm leaf philosophical texts & a quaint nicely preserved home of a well-known writer.

While the town appears warped in time, coming downhill, one realizes that the time has just flown by. A surreal experience.