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My first encounter with the Jaina religion might have left little more than a fleeting impression on my mind had it not been for the giant statue of Bahubali in Shravanabelgola.
It was in 1968, the year in which Martin Luther King, the Great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, was assassinated; the students of Paris staged a violent protest against the existing order, and Russian tanks rolled into Prag, the capital of Czecho-Slovakia; "one's right to force" had by that time become a favourite argument with many an European intellectual. In that eventful year it was that I set out (from West Germany) on a random pilgrimage to places of religion and meditation.
After Ethiopia, where I lived a while with the Christian monks of a remote mountain monastery and visited the famous roo hewn churches of Lalibela, I travelled deck class from Mombasato Bombay. In India I soon realized that I had to be very selective: there were just too many places worth seeing. I went to see the caves of Elephanta
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