The red dot on the map marks the city of Amritsar in the Punjab in India, about 25km from the border with Pakistan. Within the city is the Golden Temple.
It is a Sikh temple, and because of the adherents’ belief in the importance of maintaining the vibration, music and singing have been a constant since 1604.
I can’t imagine there is anywhere else on Earth that has been vibrating for over four hundred years.
The vibration is maintained by musicians who sit and play 20 hours a day every day.
For those four hours late at night and into the following morning, others take over and recite prayers continuously while around them cleaners clean the place ready for the next day.
I went to Amritsar in the 1990s, specifically to visit the temple, and I recall the room with musicians seated in a circle, a room with open walls supported by slender columns, and a view over the lake, and a causeway that led from the lakeside.
Interruption
The vibrations were interrupted for about a day and a half in 1984 when Indira Gandhi, then prime minister of India, ordered an assault on the temple because a group of Sikh separatists were headquartered there.
The temple was damaged and hundreds were killed.
Five months later Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in retaliation for the attack.
It is hard to imagine that Indira Gandhi was at ease with bodyguards from the same group against whom she had ordered an attack. And yet, those are facts.
She was shot in her garden while making her way to an interview with Peter Ustinov, the actor, who was doing a television series on global leaders and wanted to interview her.
Ustinov said later that the experience was surreal. He heard the sounds from the other side of a high hedge and could not believe that they really were shots.
The Golden Temple
I didn’t have a camera with me when I visited the Golden Temple. I don’t recall that I had a camera in those days. Photography meant all the rolls of film one had to carry and the problems with airport scanners fogging film.
Digital photography changed that.
So this image is generated within WordPress. I told AI what to do and it did it. There are many photographs of the Golden Temple from which AI could draw, provided I gave it sufficiently clear guidelines, so I thought it would be a good candidate.
AI added a caption to the image mentioning the Amrit Sarovar, and I had to look it up, and found that The Amrit Sarovar is the holy tank or lake surrounding the Golden Temple. Its name translates to the ‘Pool of the Nectar of Immortality’, and it is from the word Amrit that the city of Amritsar gets its name.
Why I Wrote This Post
I was thinking about the Mousetrap, the play that I wrote about last month, a play that has been running for 74 years, and it got me thinking. And then Amritsar and the Golden Temple came to mind, and the years of music and prayers happening there more or less without interruption since 1604.
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