TN Tour 1: The Obligatory Grand Tour

As I’d said many weeks ago, the ‘South Tour’ is pretty much an inevitable high school excursion in our parts and I don’t know how it came about that I missed the grand tour of Tamil Nadu’s temples.

But still, the desire came and the plan formed itself. I am glad to have waited. Not to have wasted the first breathtaking glimpse of all this grandeur on a callow, self-absorbed teen but instead to approach it in adulthood with at least a modicum of appreciation and a certain capacity for awe. And also a certain ripening of Bhakti.

Ours was not an overly devout upbringing. Certainly not the temple-hopping kind. Yes, there was a puja room in the house and a certain openness to the Divine, but I was as confused as the next person about religion and spirituality. I remember puzzling over Ganesha. Was I to take him literally? Or as a reference or pointer to something more subtle? Now, after being initiated on the spiritual path, I have evolved into an even grander canvas of confusion.  

So was this a pilgrimage? Yes. Adventure? Most certainly. A mission? Yes. We were setting off just as Sadhguru had left for the Caribbean for the Save Soil Movement. For the arduous, extremely demanding 100-day journey that he was embarking on, we were excited, concerned and eager to beseech the benediction of the gods. 

Once we decided that we were going to do this, Shweta and I sat down to planning in a hurry – we had to do all the biggies, we had to include the four pancha bhuta sthalas in TN, we had to visit the Devis, we had to go to Rameshwaram, we had to go to Palani. Tamil Nadu being Tamil Nadu, there are a host of samadhis too and Shweta had a parallel list of various places of high energy that we had to include. And then what about all the spectacular architecture… it was a mission! But we managed to simmer it down to a workable circuit.

And this, more or less is how we went about it.

***

“When God is your tour guide…” Shweta muttered once.

That’s how it felt.

It seemed like every step was charted out for us. Everything seemed to fall in place. The timing, where to be at what moment, where to go, where not to go. You will feel, as we did, that these are an extraordinary number of lucky coincidences for anyone to have. And yet, that’s how it was.