ADHVAGATI

  The Mythic Society  has always been a familiar  name , since its quarterly journals were part of the home  library , subscribed since Grandfather's days . Though as young ones , we hardly perused the super scholarly  articles in it , we did feel properly proud when some  awed friends and visitors commented on their presence in our shelves . If they assumed that the whole family was given to erudition , we did not  actively try to disabuse them of that thought . All I know is that Father and Grandfather were sometimes seen with their noses in the Quarterly . And that ,  I had once picked up a random issue out of curiosity and  was quite tickled to read an article about a pre-medieval lady poet  who wrote .......some unexpectedly "frank"  poems in  chaste Sanskrit !  The Society , housed in a very handsome colonial building in Bengaluru , named Daly Memorial Hall ,  very close to where near relatives lived , remained ...

  Kanyakumari , being the proverbial southern tip of our peninsula, is often imagined to be at the exact endpoint of an inverted triangle , with the three oceans neatly converging at that locus. The  "ground reality",  so to speak , is not all that geometrically precise .  It did come as a surprise that the real  tip of  S. India is the estuary where River Pazhaiyaru enters the ocean. Kanyakumari stands a little way off  center.  At the real endpoint , there are no tourist mobs, no souvenir shops, no  overcrowded ferry to Vivekananda Rock  -  no  Rock or  looming Statue . Just a broad  dazzling river meandering from between the  purple and gray ranges of the Western Ghats  , slicing the town of Manakkudi into "Upper Town" and "Lower Town" on either bank and creating  a gorgeous estuary  at the sea , a wetland that teems with biodiverse life forms . The Virgin Goddess hailed by the hymning waves...

One of the benefits of living in an industrial suburb of a small town in Indonesia was the opportunity we got to visit some very exotic sites , scattered around Central Java. One of them was BOROBUDUR. The data about Borobudur : A World Heritage Site . The Largest Buddhist Stupa in the world. " The Temple With No Inside" . Built between 740 and 852 AD ( the precise years  as given by Britannica)    during the reign of King Samaratungga of  Shailendra Dynasty. Seismic activity ( or a war or cultural shift) caused  total  abandonment in around 950 AD ; swallowed by jungle and forgotten till 1814 when Stanford Raffles rediscovered the humongous rubble. Painstaking, continuous restoration by various nationalities .... Opened for pilgrimage and tourism in 1973. The monument is built like a stone ( lava-rock) cladding over a natural hill ( hence, "no Inside") in Central Java, not very far from the holy volcano Merapi. It is 9 tiered,(six of th...

  Everything about Srirangam Ranganathaswami Temple is MEGA . It reflects even in the word usages : everything  is prefixed by "Periya" (= Big/Mega)  : The temple is Periya Kovil, the God is Periya Perumal , the Devi is Periya Piratti , the music is Periya Melam, the cooking of neivedyam is Periya Avasaram, the sweets offered is Periya Paniyaram, the holy bath is Periya Tirumanjanam .......periya list .  The Island town formed by the bifurcation of River Kaveri into two streams ( Kaveri and Kollidam)  is not merely a geographical feature , but , to people of Faith , a spiritual space that is not of this world , A Sacred Realm , the Rangam,  ruled by that Enchanter Supreme : Ranganatha  (Arangan, in Tamil)  The  Vaishnavas of Southern India  fiercely uphold that the Temple of  Ranganathaswami at Srirangam  is a phenomenon  that exists between The Two Treasured Realms  (UbhayaVibhutis) of the Primordial Purusha , ...