My Religious Journey to Shirdi Sai Baba & Shani Shingnapur

We reached Shirdi at 1030hrs & straight away entered in the temple premises. Sai Baba Temple is one of the richest temples in the India. Both Shirdi & Shani Shingnapur comes under the Ahmednagar District of Maharashtra (not to be confused with the Gujarat one). The first timer should always wary of local shop owners or touts. After entering the premises, you need to submit your electronics items i.e. camera, mobile along with your Shoes/ slippers to designated counters at a nominal fee (do carry your photo IDs). For those who don’t have the luxury of VIP Passes, they can get the free passes from the counter. Each & every person has to obtain their pass by themselves as they either take your retinal scan or click your photo then generate the pass. A certain no of batch can only go in the certain time period for “Darshan”. One should check from which gate no. is their entry as mentioned in the pass.

We joined the Queue at around 1100hrs & finished at 1400hrs. It took us 3 hours to do the “Darshan” of Sai Baba. Being stuck in the Queue was a tedious job, & we realized it in the middle that our timing of reaching there was not good. Apparently, they do the Prayers at around 1130hrs so for approximately 45 minutes “Darshan” was stopped. We got amused by the way the queue took us, the layout is such to cross one room, one has to take the 4-5 round of the same area.

Finally, we found ourselves in main temple hall to see the Sai Baba. Seeing was way quicker than waiting for it, as security personnel was trying to rush each of the persons over there. Sai Baba statue is placed in the middle, & one can do the “Darshan” either by from front or through the sideways. The priests will help you out in placing the flowers, garlands or sheets.

There is also the small “Pratishtha” of Sai Baba outside of the main premises along with the Sai Shrine. I realized it was the debatable question sometimes back that is Sai was a Hindu or Muslim.

While exiting, do note that from which main entrance gate you entered first, otherwise chances are you will have to roam around unnecessary to find that idle gate (same happened with us, we were walking or say jumping barefoot in that heated floor to reach our desired gate).

We didn’t explore the market as we were getting late, so we decided to straight away go to Shani Shingnapur.

Shani Shingnapur

The thing fascinated us while travelling towards Shani Shingnapur was Bull carting. The entire area of Shingnapur village is covered with sugarcane fields and local people use bull to extract juice from the sugarcane, instead of machines. You can find all those huts all the way along with the road.