Roughly ten years back, Doordarshan ran a series of selected Discovery Channel programs under the name Discovery Hour. The one hour show, instant pleasure for a nerd kid, was telecast everyday at noon during the summer vacations.
One of the episodes in the series was on Hinduism in the South-East Asia. The episode could also have been on Tourism or Architecture or some weird Satanic Science prevalent in that part of the world. It was such a long time ago and the memory is so faded, I hardly remember anything. But there was one part of the show that got etched in my mind permanently. The narrator spoke (in poorly dubbed Hindi) of a river which had numerous Shivlings carved all along its bed. Apparently some sages, who had too much devotion and too little work at their hands, thought it was cool to cover the river bed with thousands of sacred phalluses, the aniconic representation of Lord Shiva. Continue reading ‘The Search’
