The Taj Mahal is one tourist attraction we have not seen in India,

We were driving through Agra at night on our way from Delhi to Kolkata and couldn’t be bothered to drive the 50 km off the highway to check it out.

I have lingering regret about it.

Now we’ve just arrived in Sirsa, Haryana the home of the wildly famous Baba Ram Rahim.

Baba is part guru, part rock star and possesses an over the top personality and massive following. At 40-50 million followers, he is more popular than Lady Gaga.

Photo courtesy of IndiaTVnews

Baba orchestrates large-scale actions with the man power he commands,

I’ve heard the rumors from our driver Pankaj, “Baba called his followers to clean all the Garbage of Delhi in one day! With his followers, he built an entire hospital in three days! He planted over six million trees in eight hours!” In fact Baba Ram holds sixteen Guinness World records including the Largest Vegetable Mosaic, the Largest Finger Painting, and the most people sanitizing their hands simultaneously.

He has a complex in Haryana called Dera, which is basically an entire city, with theme restaurants and various hotels for people to stay at when they come to town to hear him speak.

Our host in Harayana happens to work security for the Baba and I was thrilled to learn we’d be able to have a private tour of his empire.

We hopped in a golf cart and disappeared into a tunnel through a gaping duck’s mouth and reappeared on the other side through the pupil of a giant eyeball.

His complex boasts many fancy restaurants and hotels with rooms upward of 35,000 rupees per night (approx $600 US).  

There is a Baba Ram movie theater which only plays his movies. Photos of him are everywhere. Even the gym of one of his hotels is decked out with photos of him in his fancy cars, on his motorcycles, and… flexing.

We enter into Baba’s theme resort full large village of colorful independent suites and marvel at the Chinese pagoda, giant “Horse head” suite, and many other suites modeled after famous landmarks. 

And we finally got to see the great Taj Mahal.