பேசலாம் வாங்க!

The Holy Experience

The Holy Experience

It was my third trip to Sabarimala, and my faith keeps increasing every time I set foot on that soil. It has been a a holy trip which has brought me a lot of inner peace, an enriching experience on the whole.

Well, unlike last time we had a team of 8 people this time around and most of them were working for the same team in Oracle and I was the lone IBMer. We had pooja in Tavarekere Ayyapan temple, had "irumudy" done and my room mates(Suresh & Gokul) were present for the ocassion.
I had Narro(my school buddy) for my company and and also had Anish as Guruswamy and Ratan joining as well. We had narro's manager along his colleague who were "kannisaamies". We got our tickets confirmed from RAC thankfully and started our holy voyage.
Unlike last time, there was less excitement this time in the train and people preferred to sleep like logs in their berths rather than playing games.


We reached Kottayam @ around 12 noon and booked a Jeep to Erumely, there we had Kannisaamies trying to dance from Vaavar sannidhi to the main temple. With the sun scorching we had to make it to the temple quite soon. After having darshan, certain section of our troupe preferred to dip in the pond @ Erumeley and later had lime sodas to quench our thirst.

From there we proceeded to river Pamba and to our disappointment, Pamba was almost dry with water level not even to knee height. we had to use vessels as mugs to bathe in the river, after a cool session in the holy river, we had a light lunch and started the holy climb.
We climbed through jungle side of "Siriya paadhai" as we had brought bow/arrows, Knife and bells from erumely. As per norms, we had kanni saamies shooting arrows near the idol on the way. We reached the holy site by 8:30 pm and sine we had gone in offseason, temple darshan closes @ 10:30 pm. We gathered our coconuts, prayed and climbing the holy 18 steps. And inside, we had a amazing darshan. I got to check it twice and it was simply amazing. I got a amazing view and made sure that i conveyed all my prayers to the almighty.





After that, Myself along with hosur guy(one in our troupe) bought prasadam. Myself and Narro had to make an adjustment with our troupe guys regarding tying the BELL as we had so many people waiting to pounce on it at any cost. With great determination & Swiftness we moved like a hawk and got it done. We were quite happy that our bells were taken by our guys while one of our troupe mate who is a third timer as well lost it to an outsider.

We started back next morning, and coming down the hill was an adventure thanks to the company that i got with Ratan. Ratan was in such a hurry while climbing down, I had to increase my pace to keep track with him. We came in a Junglee route and were down quite quickly. Had our regular limesodas and started back by booking a cab to kottayam.
Finally, my presence had made an impact as we started to gel and play "Yaar mansaula yaru Murali sollraaru paaru" the local version of :20 questions, 3 guesses". It was an amazing session with lots of tuff rounds and we were in kottayam in almost 90 minutes. We had our lunch in one of Tamilnadu style restaurants. Well, it was time for us to split ways and part. One section going to bangalore had go to bus stand for their Volvo bus while we had to go to chennai through train.
We had to wait in the station for almost 2 hours as train got delayed and were chewing about the memories about the darshan we had. The weather at Kottayam was too hot and I was commenting to Narro that it would have been better if we had got tickets for AC coach as we were quite tired and were sweating doing nothing.

Finally our train came and to our surprise there were were 2 "saamies" already sitting on our seat and when we asked them to move, they said their tickets were RAC and got seats confirmed by TTR just now. So, we were waiting for TTR to settle issue and when he did come in, he checked out ticket and to our surprise asked us to move. Well, TTR asked us to move in to AC sleeper. Yippeee... when train stopped at a signal, we jumped out and found our seats in AC. We were quite thrilled and owed gratitude to our holiness whom we had worshipped recently. Wow, felt like a miracle, booked normal tickets and got to be in AC sleeper. There is something special about the place which makes people going there so often.

Swamiye Saranam Ayappa!