Category Archives: Temple

The Temples of Singapore

The one thing that you’re not going to miss much if you’re in Singapore is the visits to temple. Though the temples here are no match to our ancient temples in terms of the architectural marvels, the divine atmosphere still remains the same. The moment you step inside a temple, many a times it still feels like you’re still in Tamil Nadu. The deities beautifully decorated, the sacred chants by the pusaaris/kurukkaLs/pattaacharis, the sounds of nadaswaram and tavil, the brisk sale of nei viLakkus and archanai tickets and the temples filled with a whole lot of South Indians barring a few North Indians and foreigners create the familiar atmosphere of our very own temples.

The best part about the temples here is that every temple has its own nadaswaram and tavil players, which, unfortunately, is not the case with the temples in Tamil Nadu. It feels great to see the musical rituals too being followed strictly at all the temples here with the nadaswaram and tavil players playing the mallaris and other pieces at all the stipulated timings all through the day. My daughter being a big fan of the music made by pee-pee dum-dum 🙂 absolutely enjoys visiting the temples.

No post on the temples in Singapore will be complete without mentioning another best part about the temples here, which is, guess what, the prasadams! But that deserves a separate post in itself, so wait and watch out for that.

Adikaara Nandi at Kapaleeswarar Temple

The deities, the huge flower garlands adorning them, the Nadaswaram, the band, the kolams on the Mada veedis, the devotees thronging the Mada veedis to get a darshan of Kapaleeswara, the traffic diversions, the pandals on the Mada veedis where the deities rest for a while, the koDa rATnams/merry-go-round, etc. – It’s that time of the year when Mylapore has an aura of festivity and divinity to it with the Panguni Festival on at Kapaleeswarar temple and today is the day of Adikaara Nandi. The deities are taken out in procession at around 6:00 in the morning. I went there at around 8:00 am and saw the deities in procession at South Mada Street.

Lord Vinayaka:

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Sri Srinivasa Perumal Temple at Semmenchery

I visited this temple in July 2011.

During random browsing, I came across this post on dharsanam.com about Sri Srinivasa Perumal Temple at Semmenchery. I was surprised that I had never heard of such an ancient temple being right here on OMR despite coming to OMR everyday for the past few years, though the moment I read the name I remembered seeing the temple somewhere. So off I went in search of this temple.
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Lesser Known Temples of Chennai – Some More

“Lesser Known Temples of Chennai – Some More” – A lecture by Dr. Chithra Madhavan on 23rd August, 2011 at Gallery Sri Parvati held as part of Madras Day celebrations.

It was a nostalgic-me who attended this lecture since it was during the Madras Day celebrations in 2008 that I first attended Dr. Chithra Madhavan’s lecture little knowing that after that lecture, my visits to old temples would never be the same anymore and that I would go on to attend many more lectures of hers in the coming years. The topic of that lecture was ‘Lesser Known Temples of Chennai’ and this year’s too was again ‘Lesser Known Temples of Chennai – Some More’.

As usual, this lecture too was filled with a wealth of information. The photos of almost all the sculptures, vimanams and gopurams that were mentioned about were shown.
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Mylapore Temples Walk

This walk was by Dr. Chithra Madhavan and it was organized by ‘Namma Mylapore’ on 7th March, 2010. Srinivasa Perumal, Kesava Perumal, Kapaleeswarar, Mundagakanni Amman, Madhava Perumal, Karaneeswarar and Virupaksheeswarar temples were the temples that were covered in this walk. History, architecture, sculptures and inscriptions were the focus of this walk. So, we didn’t see the main deities in most of the temples.
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Arupatthumoovar at Kapaleeswarar Temple

After seeing the grand Arupatthumoovar at Kapaleeswarar temple, I had to ‘unblock’ the blogger’s block somehow and write this post. This is a very long post! Read it when you find time.

Despite living very near Mylapore for almost 15 years now, I had never been to Arupatthumoovar even once! When I was studying in school, festival time at Kapaleeswarar temple always meant getting a holiday or two and that was all. This year’s Arupatthumoovar was on last Saturday (27th March) &, initially, I wasn’t planning on going for it. My mom having gone for Arupatthumoovar for the first time last year, tempted me to go and, here I am now, all set to relive the grandeur of the fest which left me awe-struck.
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Guruvayur

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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Chamundi Hills

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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Tirupati, here I come

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. 🙂

Exhibition of photographs of the ruins of Hampi

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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