Helen Stephenson's India Trip - June-July, 2006 - Lotus Temple

Saturday June 24^th ...continued

Our next stop was the Lotus Temple of the Bahai faith. This was the first place I’ve visited where I’ve had to take my shoes off. They had a very efficient shoe check-in system and handed you a token for the later redemption of your shoes. This is a new building which has only been a part of Delhi for about 20 years. It’s a beautiful structure which could almost be twinned with the Sydney Opera House, except that’s much bigger. The Lotus Temple is large enough to hold 1300 people, and its symmetry is based on nine, with some parts based on 27. The interior is topped by a dome, but photography inside the Temple isn’t permitted, so I can’t show you that. Photography outside is OK, though, and I clicked away quite happily. I changed lenses several times, and discovered after I’d visited the Visitor Centre that I’d picked up a large speck of dust on my sensor. My blower brush was back in the hotel and so I took the chance on condensation and blew on the sensor, which shifted the dust speck. (It was so big it was easily visible to the naked eye, so I visually confirmed that it was gone, which was borne out by subsequent pictures. A few PhotoShop repairs were needed on the few pictures prior to my blowing the dust away.)

I may have gone a little overboard with the saturation control when editing some of these. They're a fraction too colourful, I think, with hindsight.

The water pools followed the nine-symmetry, but I don't know whether there were pools on the side where vistors didn't go.

The Lotus Temple is high enough to offer some good views, and I spent some time pointing my lens away from the Temple!

There were crowds of visitors on the day I went to the Lotus Temple. The picture on the left has the shoe pick-up area in the foreground. I mentioned that shoes were handled very efficiently: they were dropped off on one side of the shoe changing area in exchange for a token, and then picked up from a different window on the other side once your visit to the Temple was complete.

Here is the entrance to the visitor centre.

I liked the display of green plants outside the visitor centre entrance.

While at the Lotus Temple, I really thought I was going to get caught in a downpour. The sky darkened and the wind whipped up and I saw a lot of people running in the other direction, presumably also of the opinion that it was going to rain. I was close enough to the Temple to think going on was my best option, but I did have to field my hat, which the wind tried to take. It was just as well I had my ponytail pulled through it as that gave me time to grab the cap before it blew right off. I heard some rumbles of thunder and a few spots of rain fell, but the major downpour must have gone off somewhere else to happen. In fact, it did: they had heavy rain at Gurgaon where the hotel is!