Bullet Baba's Mandir

Got the chance to sift through a few old photos. Here is one of the hundreds of interesting spots that dot the dusty, vibrant highways of Rajasthan.

There were four of us college friends in a cab, travelling from Jaipur, to meet another classmate in Jodhpur. The conversation inevitably kept turning to our old memories of travelling on the same route and all the fun and adventures we had.

I was travelling on this route after around twenty years. Yeah, that’s almost a lifetime (and it gives away my age ☹). The double-laned highways had become six-laned and now zoomed over village crossings where earlier we had to wait for herds of buffaloes or marriage processions to pass.

But if you looked closely enough, nothing much had changed. Everyone now carried mobile phones, but they traveled pretty much the same way.

The ‘gorbandh’ used to decorate (and probably differentiate) cattle and camels were still sold at every pitstop for travellers-they just tie them to their bikes and tractors now.

There was one place where we had to stop and let the crowd go.

“What happened, is there some mela here?”

“This is Bullet Baba’s mandir. It is always crowded.” 
The driver was not a very talkative guy and probably irritated listening to us talking all the way.

“What’s that?”

“You don’t know?” He was aghast at us behaving like firangs. “You can read it up on google.”

I did.

This is a temple where they worship a Bullet Motor Cycle!

If we could worship stones and animals for centuries, then why not bikes in this age?

According to the legend a person called Om Banna, riding his Enfield Bullet crashed into a tree here and died. The police registered a case and kept his bike in the local ‘thana’, but the bike went missing and came back to this spot, probably looking for its rider.

This happened repeatedly, even when the bike was chained and emptied of petrol.

When such things happen, the police backs off and the folklore takes over.

The travelers, not sure of who exactly to pray to, decided to hedge their bets and started worshiping both the bike and the tree for their own safety (thus creating another traffic nightmare on a national highway).

Our driver touched his forehead fervently and prayed for his own safety in the company of the women chattering non-stop, and picked his way out of the crowd carefully.