Most travellers to Vijayawada tell you they are there on work. It is, after all, an important industrial and IT centre of Andhra Pradesh and a city eager to get on with the business of change. But drive to its fringes, about 5 km away from the centre, and you find its ancient heart. So, at one moment, I was driving past Vodafone showrooms on MG Road and in the next, photographing a holy man with a flowing beard as long as the oldest vine of a banyan tree and as white as the Himalayas, praying to the river that courses through the city.

The Krishna, one of the longest river systems of the country, is a powerful presence in the city. On the road from Hyderabad to Vijayawada, it runs along like a sea of blue. And by the time it has traveled 1,300km from Mahableshwar in Maharashtra to Hamasaladeevi in Andhra Pradesh and then Vijayawada, it turns from a muddy trickle to a mammoth python of water. With it, the Krishna brings massive amounts of silt and, therefore, fertility and affluence to Vijayawada. On the heels of prosperity has come industrialization. And to thank the almighty for the benevolence are the splendid temples that have come up along its ghats.

My guide around town was Venkat, a 24-year-old lad, who told me with a cheeky grin that times are changing. So, now worshippers step out barefoot from a Mercedes-Benz.
It was early in the morning when I drove towards the Amaravati and past the Prakasam Barrage that forms a lovely artificial lake. Here, too, devotees were busy at prayers, the saffron of their clothes enhanced by the soft rays of the rising sun.

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