The balancing rock of Lalitpur

You are driving North of Lalitpur, along National Highway No. 26, headed towards Jhansi.  And there on your left in the near distance of a monsoonal morning you see a rock on another rock.  Big deal right? 

Well, it certainly is big!

I had seen the rock many a time on my way to and fro from our HBM Hospital Community Health and Development Programme field visits.   But on Monday I determined to take a closer look.

It's the monsoon here in Lalitpur, so there was plenty of mud to walk through as I meandered through the scrub towards the rock.

Coming close you realise just how big it is!

And how amazing that this large, odd shaped rock will stay put - rain, shine, hail or thunder - over all these years!  It is a 'balancing rock' and has been there for how many years?  Centuries? Millenia? without falling.

In a world where so much seems to be tipping and tripping, it is refreshing to see something so apparently precarious, but so solidly and utterly immovable as to have stood the test of time.

Would I like to try and tip this marvel?  Never!  I tend to be on the cautious side (I think at least) and seeing so much solid stone in such an apparently tip-worthy state... I have vivid thoughts of the great granite ending its year's of being upright by falling down on me and squashing my good-self.

So instead I take a quick tour around it.  The other side looks very different!

And just to give you a picture of the size involved, here is our dear Bharat Singh - who serves as one of our community coordinators in the HBM CHDP - and is an ace driver too.  Bharat kindly walked with me through the slush to take a look at the stone - and is a good way to help get a bit of a feel for just how big the stone is....

Presenting: the balancing rock of Lalitpur!