Adi Dass and I stayed near the airport in Chennai before meeting Skanda Mata, Nalin and their fabulous driver Deva. Deva has been looking after Nalin and Skanda Mata for nearly 20 years and is like a member of the family to them. And he looked after all of us. His friends include many of the priests at various temples, and managers at hotels, restaurants and other places that people such as us would encounter. There were big smiles and lots of grace with him handling our journey, traffic and all arrangements with ease and joy.
On our first day we drove from Chennai and stayed overnight at a hotel in Tirupati, a town in Andre Pradesh, the state to the north and west of Tamil Nadu. This is our only South Indian excursion outside Tamil Nadu, as Tamil Nadu is the state of countless temples including Amma’s Peedam. What a journey it was.
We arrived at Tirupati on the evening of Divali. From around 6pm until well after I fell asleep, fireworks were going off all over the city. They certainly love their fireworks! In the morning we were up early, donning saris to visit the famous Venkateshwara Tirupati temple. One of the oldest (circa 1300-1400) most famous and among the wealthiest temples in India, it is actually quite a difficult place to visit. Unless you book in advance several months and pay a substantial fee, you get to line up in a queue that is tightly policed and takes on average 14 hours from beginning to darshan. And the queue is tens of thousands of people! To attend morning Darshan there is a 2 year waiting list.
Lord Vishnu is supposed to have put his foot on the top of the mountain, which is named Venkat. From Venkat we get the name Venkateshwara, one of the names of Lord Vishnu, which references this almighty temple and the Divine presence enshrined there. It took us about 40 minutes of winding road to drive up the mountain. There is a pilgrim path too for those who want to walk, which as you can imagine takes many hours. Food and drinks are served on the way up the hill.
We got to the temple at a pre-arranged and pre-paid darshan appointment. Thankfully we were not in the 14 hour queue, but we were in with a group of around 600 people who all had the same appointment time as us. The group was divided into what looked like 3 very large bird cages – Chai and prasad were served… and we waited only a couple of hours and then we were on the move.
There was a slow walk through caged walkways to get us up over bridges, down stairs, round corners until finally we were at the entrance to the temple. The energy was palpable and the ancient building almost spoke out loud about the presence of the Divine that has been called forth daily over the millenia.
Because so many people visit the temple daily, we are all pushed through pretty quickly. Fortunately for us, when we got right in front of Lord Vishnu, the temple priest came up and said: “LOOK!” Govinda! And yes, we did look, and we felt incredible blessings coming in and had a marvelous darshan. After some time we were also moved on.
After visiting this very remarkable temple we made our way back to the hotel and then drove to Vellore, where we stayed for three nights at the Golden Temple and saw Amma, Lakshmi and the Saturday Vishnu abishekam. I felt the connection between the temple in Tirupati and the large Vishnu at Sri Puram and it felt important to attend the Saturday abishekam, which we did. Seeing Amma and many old friends was a highlight of our 3 nights at Kamala Nivas.
Sending blessings to all of you, Om Shanti Om.
