A VISIT TO MYSORE AND TIRUVANNAMALAI

We had bought a new Honda Civic on the 18th March 2010, and wanted to have the pleasure of some real long distance travel. We had never had a new car in a long time and I remember having made about one or two visits to Mysore in my old Maruti Van. Now, here was a car that must make driving a pleasure and what with all the road blocks in the city(Bangalore), I had desisted form using the car in the city especially for short rides. Thus it sort of became an imperative that we seize every opportunity to do some long distance travel to justify the buying and possession of an expensive car- by our standards- I mean the standards of salary earners like me.
In fact we want to and do keep inventing reasons to do such travel. We drove to Mysore on the morn of 25th May reaching Mysore by about 1100 hrs. That driving was a pleasure. Notable in this visit of Mysore, was the visit to the Mysore palace, esp., the Jaganmohan Art Gallery where I found, the existence of a game of dice that goes by the name of Pachis . What was interesting in this was each of the squares had a picture associating one with a particular life and the progression through the board was to be treated as an enactment of the Hindu belief in rebirth and succession of lifetimes! Generally, this sort of a Karma and Rebirth inspired board game that is well known to native Hindus is what is called Snakes and Ladders in the west which goes by the name paramapada sopaana patam(psp). I had seen for the first time the game of Pachis being made a lifetimes-progression game. As a natural enthusiast of the Theory of Karma and Rebirth, which I find as one of the most satisfactory explanations of the inequities and indeterminacies in human life, I took an instant liking to it and wanted to sit and duplicate the same!
The striking commonality between psp and pachis is that both are games of chance. The artists’ equating the birth of a person in a particular socio-cultural milieu, to “chance” speaks volumes about the people’s belief in Karma staying close to atheism!
It doesn’t take much imagination to see that taking chance and randomness as the reason for the occurrence in a peculiar combination of events, circumstances, or connections is atheistic and incidentally the scientifically accepted view.
The one other thing that impressed me in the gallery was Raja Ravi Varma’s art. I was particularly impressed by Raja Harischandra selling his wife and son on the streets of Varanasi, Damayanti looking expectantly at the Swan flying away to Nala, and a Brahmin woman giving alms, on the footsteps of a temple. Raja Harishchandra brought tears into my eyes. In general all the art on the Palace walls took me out of this world into the world of the spectators in those works, and I felt like R.K. Lakshman’s Common Man taking part in the happenings.
The return journey to Bangalore was quite uneventful except for the delay caused by an accident en route between a truck and a car, an i10 to be precise. Of course this prompted my wife to command my son to move away from the wheel and ask me to take the driver’s position istead.
We landed in Bangalore by about 1715 hrs and after taking a break of about 45 minutes we started off again to Tiruvannamalai. The journey to get out of Bangalore city took up to 2030 hrs, a clear two and a half hours! That is how the city traffic is worsening! The travel after that was uneventful except for a goof-up by me in taking the appropriate left turn to hit the road to Chennai. We reached Tiruvannamalai by 0130 hrs early in the morning. We had reserved accommodation in Hotel Arpana, hence we could hit the sack by about 0200hrs. Since I had planned the circumambulation of the Annamalai Mountain believed to the abode of several Siddhas, I got up urgently by 0400 hrs and after due preparation went to the Ishanya Linga temple to begin my girivalam. To begin with this was a pleasant experience. But as the Sun rose higher on the horizon, I started feeling the heat on my feet. By the time I reached a point just 100m from the IL point whence I had begun, I was exhausted – surprisingly the distance is just 14 KM, not a very great distance to reckon, but I was almost fainting from the Sun beating hard. With some fervent prayers to Lord Shiva and with a last dash to the IL point, I somehow completed the girivalam. The only happy thing was that I had kept up the chanting of the mR^ityu~njaya mantra straddled by the pa~nchaakSharI mantra. This really kept up my spirits. We were there on the morn of a Full Moon, instead of being there for the night! I learnt the hard way that the right time to be there is on the night of a Full Moon Day!
The return journey I must say was uneventful in that my speed up to the point of reaching the NH 7 was around 70-80 Kmph, and on the highway I would frequently touch 135-140Kmph. Only on the well maintained toll based Highways of India can one find sufficient space to touch such speeds? This was a thrilling experience for me.
I wasn’t feeling tired at all even after reaching home at about 2330 hrs on 27/5/10. I couldn’t go the Veda Class the following morning. I resumed it only from the 29th Morn.