How it began.

That morning, in a flat in Indiranagar, two small murtis (Vitthal and Rukmini) were washed, dressed and garlanded. There was no plan to call them the beginning of anything. They were going to be carried, that evening, on a quiet walk down Old Airport Road, in the HAL / Rustumbagh stretch. The walkers were friends. The route was not long.

We had agreed, perhaps a week before, that the walking would be slow. We had agreed that we would sing the Name softly. We had agreed not to issue an invitation, not to post a flyer, not to ask anyone to come who was not already a friend. About a dozen of us, mostly in white, would meet at the edge of the park toward sunset, and we would walk together for an hour, and we would end at a small temple, and then we would go home.

What we did not know was what would happen to the street.

What the street did

The pace was slower than Bangalore’s. At first it made us self-conscious; the city does not usually slow for anyone. But after a few minutes the singing settled us, and the slowness began to feel like the point.

Then something else happened, at almost every intersection.

A young woman on a scooter stopped and folded her hands while the light was still green. A shopkeeper came out of his shop holding a small child and lifted the child’s hand in namaste. A family on the footpath, walking the other direction, stopped together as if they had practised. A man in office clothes crossed three lanes of traffic, on foot, between moving cars, to touch the edge of the wooden platform and walk away without saying a word.

And then the one that everyone who walked that evening remembers. An auto-rickshaw driver pulled to the side of the road, stepped out of his vehicle, and bowed, once, deeply, before getting back in.

We had not invited any of them. They had not come to us. We had brought a little of the temple into their street. For thirty seconds at a time, they remembered.

What we understood that evening

We had thought of the walking as something we were doing for devotion. On this walk, we understood that the walking is also a quiet gift to the street: a permission slip for the hundreds of strangers who were, in fact, ready all along. The walking was not bringing devotion to the street. It was lifting the forgetting that had been sitting on it.

The world is not as far from God as we sometimes fear. The world is busy, but busyness is not refusal. Busyness is the forgetting. And forgetting, it turns out, wants very little in order to lift: a garlanded form passing through an evening street, a song repeated softly, a small band of people who look, for once, like they have nothing to sell.

What we decided afterwards

The first walk was anchored by Ananta, the friend in whose flat the murtis had been garlanded that morning. He carried the murti for most of the route; he sang most of the abhangs. When the walk ended at the temple, several of us, without quite agreeing on it in words, knew we had been part of something we wanted to keep doing.

In the weeks that followed, the harder decisions were made on purpose. The form would be held as Commons, not asset: never registered as a trademark, free for anyone in any city to begin. The walks would always be free. There would be no organisation at the centre. The locality, not the city, would be the operational unit; each locality would have its own anchor, its own meeting point, its own WhatsApp group, its own rhythm or lack of one. Ananta’s name should not, ten years from now, be the first thing anyone associates with the form. That is the work.

We told no journalists. We sent out no press release. This page is the only place this story is written down. We thought that was the right shape for the beginning.

If you want to know the deep past of the form this walk is a tributary of (the Varkari padyatra, the Sankirtan, the songs of the Alvars and Nayanars, the vachanas of the Lingayats, the abhangs of the Haridasas, the verses of the sants of north India, the padāvalī of the Shakta Bengal), that page is ready.

If you want to know the far future of the form, the small possible shape of every neighbourhood walking when it is moved to walk, that page is ready too.

And the first folio of writing on the walk itself, the longer essay set down on the night of 23 April 2026, lives in the Journal.

Anyone may walk. Anyone may pray. The walks are free.