Govindaa….., Gooovindaa……….. and other unrelated matters.

I had visited the holy shrine of Tirupati about tweleve years back. I had had a face to face with Lord Venkateshwara for a second, after waiting in the queue for seven and a half hours. After the experience, I had resolved to maintain my contact with the lord only at spiritual level and if necessary, visit any of his lookalike representatives spread all over the country who are easier to approach. But the passage of years had erased many aspects of that visit from my memory. So, when a group of our relatives decided to visit Tirupati, offered to make necessary arrangements, and invited me to join them, I joined them.

The lord of Tirumala is standing there to collect money to repay his never ending debt, and it is no surprise that money plays a big role here. You get to see the lord for free if you wait in a queue for twenty four hours. Pay fifty and you join the queue half way up and the waiting period is reduced by half. Pay three hundred and you start still further and the time is reduced to a quarter. Etc etc. These are official amounts and they play a role only till you enter the inner precincts of the temple. Then onwards all three lines merge, all are equal and it is a stampede. Might is right there. But the good thing is that you don’t have to move. You join the crowd and it takes care of you. You are like a leaf in the rushing water. You simply enter the temple and shoot out from the other side without realizing what is happening and apart from keeping your body parts intact, if you can think of anything else, you may think of the lord and have a glimpse. The temple is open for about 18 hours on a normal day and about sixty thousand people visit every day. That gives about a second per person in front of the lord. But, if you can slip a hundred or two in to the hands of one of the guards without making it obvious and if you can assume that the lord did not see you bribing, (in my opinion he will not mind even if he notices your bribe. He himself is one of the biggest bribe seekers but I do not know if he will be lenient towards his subordinates emulating him) you may get another two seconds in front of the lord.

We paid three hundred and waited for four and a half hours, which is supposed to be not bad at all. By evening the same line had stretched for more than two kilometers and I am sure the ‘quick darshan’ took not less than eight to ten hours.
There are many other things which impressed me at Tirupati but all that is common knowledge.

The eagerness to see the lord, the devotion and the frenzy cannot be explained. One has to experience it. Whether you have faith or not, a visit to Tirupati is a must. But once is enough.

I was talking to a friend about it and wondered whether it is devotion or madness?
He called it mad devotion.

On the way to Tirupati I was in Bangalore for a day. I had to visit some of our relatives. Moving around in the Bangalore traffic is a pain and I dread these visits. But it cannot be avoided and I usually spend three fourths of my time in Bangalore, on the roads learning to live on carbon monoxide. This time I landed in Bangalore on the day of solar eclipse. I did not know that solar eclipse also eclipsed the mental abilities of Bangaloreans. People were afraid of the ‘harmful rays’ coming out from the sun and remained indoors. All shops closed. All offices closed. No schools and colleges. All roads empty. No cooking, no eating. I wish solar eclipse occurred more often. I could just plan my visits to match the eclipse and have a field day in Bangalore. I covered distances that usually take an hour, in ten minutes. Since none of my relatives cooked in their houses, I had to eat my lunch in a hotel but I am ready to sacrifice home food if I can zip around Bangalore as I did on the eclipse day.

Today’s papers carried two items which gave me something to feel happy about. One is the decision of the central government to de recognize about forty five ‘deemed universities’. I do not know about other colleges but I am sure that the medical and dental colleges which are in the list managed to get their DU status by pulling strings and filling pockets only to get exempted from sharing their seats with the CET candidates so that they could ‘sell’ all of them. It may inconvenience the students a bit but will save the future of many thousands.

The second item: TOI dt 20.1.10
‘As is the rule with our netas, CM Digambar kamat arrived fashionably late for a concert of Zakir Hussain at Margao on Tuesday. The Tabla maestro had asked the organizers to block movement in the front rows once he started playing.
Kamat arrived an hour late and was being ushered to a seat in the front row when Hussain changed his beat and said “this is for late comers. Those who are late have no right to the front seats. They should take the back seats no matter who they are”. Stunned, the CM scrambled to the first available seat.’

Cngratulations to Mr Hussain.