Kumbakonamed!

You that the 'Chappel' stand was at the Adelaide oval? Time to change. There's a 'Chapple' stand at Vaitheeswaran Koil. Greg and Ian Chappel should be proud of their fame spreading to the remotest corners of India. My wife's family deity resides at Vaitheeswaran koil, 5 hours from Chennai on Road. We had been there to pay our obeisance to god. The temple has a strange tradition where you buy pepper and jaggery and immerse it in the pond and save some for a basket. I dont know if the temple has any means of cleaning this pollution.

This photo was taken at my wife's grandparents place inKumbakonam(Bharathy Nagar). There was a grand welcome for the two newly married grandchildren of their family (Wife and her cousin brother). Every day out there was a grand feast, with food served on the banana leaf. This place was away from the madness of Kumbakonam town, so there was a lot of peace and calm around the area. We also visited a couple of temples that was a hop skip and jump from the house.



This was taken in the morning of Saturday, at Thirunageswaram, a small town close to Kumbakonam. This town is famous for the 'Rahu-Kethu' temple and is believed to cure your problems. The more money you pay, you get a better view of the idols. The economically less priveleged, have to wait for a while in the lines, and have a gallery view(Door Darshan), while the richer ones, by the virtue of money come closer to the idols. This class divide was sick and I was thinking, why even have relegion and caste in the first place. I was all along thinking that if a VC had a chance, he should invest in a temple fund and become a trustee than put it in media/real estate/start ups. You would get better returns on your capital employed, as its easy to extract money based on the insecurities that plague people, making the devotess seek refuge by bribing god.

This was taken at Thiruvadaimarudur, a small town 15 kms from Kumbakonam. This was my mother's ancestral town, and her birthplace. She seemed all excited to visit the place, and even met a temple priest who was my aunt's classmate way back in the 1960's, when they studied at Thiruvidaimarudur. The temple was a nice place to doze off and also admire the artwork on the temple. This image in the temple shows how people blindly use charcoal to put their exam hall ticket numbers in the hope that God scans these numbers and sends a 'supari' to the examiners that these hall ticket numbers need to have higher scores than the pass mark. More higher scores are believed to be obtained, if you write in a bigger font, or perform some puja whose economic value is supposed to be proportionate to the marks you would want to bribe god from.

This was followed by an evening visit to Thanjavur to meet one of Janani's aunts, and spend some time there in their house, which had a lovely garden. I tried out Idli with Ghee and Chilli powder. Seemed a welcome departure from the normal oil and chilli powder.
There ends part 1 of this travellogue. Wait until Part 2