Aparna’s Blog

I had been to Guruvayur on 31st Jan, a Sunday. Guruvayur is about 28km from Thrissur. We reached the Guruvayur Shri Krishna (Guruvayurappan) temple at around 4:25 pm. The temple is usually closed from 1:00 pm to 4:30 pm. So, almost half the queue complex outside the temple was already full by the time we reached. There is no concept of buying tickets and getting a special darshan here either. If one doesn’t want to go to the inner sanctum of Guruvayurappan, then there is another entrance through which one can go near the dhwajastambham of the temple alone. The temple has a tank called rudra tIrtam, which is next to this entrance.
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A few months back, I had been to Chamundi Hills with a friend. It was fun since we did not have any idea about the place as such and how exactly we were going to go there. All I knew was that there is a temple of Chamundeshwari, a huge statue of Nandi and a statue of Mahishasura in Chamundi Hills. It is another fact that it so turned out that those are the only things that are there.
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The weekend just got over, but with just a few hours of work in between, a two-day mini-vacation of sorts has already started for me. Am right now on the way to Tirupati for a relative’s wedding and, of course, a visit to Tirumala and a few more temples.

I love these long-distance car journeys on highways. Let me now not start the complaint about parts of this NH205 not having great road. The sun, though shining bright, is slowly getting ready for setting and am eagerly awaiting the visual treat that I am going to be presented with. Rahman’s music is already providing me an aural treat.

Last weekend was a great one and so very reminiscent of December Season, thanks to Svanubhava & Sikkil Gurucharan’s concert and Dr. Chithra Madhavan’s lecture, with which concluded my memorable weekend.
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Rummaging through my bag, in which, I should tell you, are lots of papers, I started going through what I had written on those. Songs lists of concerts, notes taken down during lec-dems, lyrics of songs, thoughts which I wanted to later become blog posts and even full posts which I never got around to typing on the computer and publishing. There are a whole lot of writings which didn’t become posts in this blog at the time it should have! Anyway, here is a very belated post on a photography exhibition with inputs from what I had written on one of those papers right after coming back from the exhibition.

A few months back, or to be precise, from 23rd March to 4th April, there was a photography exhibition titled ‘Vijayanagara – Splendour in Ruins’ at Lalit Kala Akademi organized by Alkazi Foundation in association with Prakriti Foundation. It was an exhibition of rare photos of Hampi taken in 1855-1856 by Alexander Greenlaw, an army officer.
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This is my 500th post! A big thanks to each and everyone of you for making this happen!

A couple of weekends back, I had been to Mayavaram with my family and, as usual, we visited lots of temples. On Sunday, we went to Kudumiyanmalai and on Monday, we went to a whole lot of temples in and around Kumbakonam – Kumbheshwarar, Darasuram, Patteswaram, Baanapureeswarar, Thiruvisainallur SivayOginAtar temple, Thirunthudevankudi Karkateswarar temple, Thirubhuvanam, Thiruloki Sivan and perumAL temples. Almost all these temples are architectural marvels and, needless to say, we were just bowled over by the stunning architectural beauty!
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4 days. 10 temples with no two temples being close to each other.1600+ km travel by car - Exhausting, tiring yet a very memorable trip!

Apart from a few temples that we had on our must-visit list, visit as many temples as possible without rushing even in a single place was the only plan that we had for this trip. And we did succeed in doing that. We left the entire trip planning to the driver since he knew all the routes.
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