Kanchipuram Varadaraja Perumal Brahmotsavam

-
https://picasaweb.google.com/117457435121435010099/Utsavam2012

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Elegant temple and the exotic maidens

-
Image
 The Kakatiya grandeur at Palampet, Telangana  In the book ‘Royal Patrons and Great Temple Art’, Shehbaz H. Safrani, author of the chapter on the Ramappa Temple in Telangana compares the patron of the temple General Recherla Rudra to Pericles for his statesmanship and also for his famous temple, the Parthenon. Across India there are scores of temples that have been built, endowed by queens, generals, traders, trade guilds etc., While one can think of local comparisons, to the Somanatha Dandanayaka a general of Hoysala king Narasimha III who built Somanathapura, a global comparison is beyond me. However, the size and effort of Pericles being compared to Recherla makes one sit up and take note of the size of the temple and tank he constructed and also his role and importance in the reign of an illustrious Kakatiya king Ganapatideva. While historians of the Marxist school or the post-modernist have not been kind to the kings and the temple builders, mostly attributing them to p...
Read more

Shyaamalaam Saralaam Susmitaam Bhuushitaam

-
Image
Silent revolutionaries - Sowbhagyalakshmi Srirama Bharati It was May 2017, and that trip to Chennai was not just a routine stopover on the way to Kanchipuram. In April I had won the Justice Telang Fellowship in Indology - with just no more than a love for Alwars and their verses and a deep interest in traditional performing arts I had chosen the topic 'Araiyar Cevai - Millennial Retrospective'. I didn't know where to begin. Someone told me Kalakshetra had archived 'Araiyar Cevai' and I thought I will begin there. That is when a friend told me how she was part of the team that worked on that archiving, archiving works of Srirama Bharati, the man who took Araiyar Cevai from its traditional practitioners and setting to a secular stage. I had heard about his moving, devotion soaked Cevai but just around the time I got to know about him he passed away. Too young and too early - in 2000 when he was just 50. In May ‘17 when I searched for his videos on...
Read more

Loss and discovery

-
Image
  Some years ago I had enrolled for a course on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra at the K.R. Cama Institute along with a friend. It was as my father accused me of, an excuse for having been a lazy non-practitioner trying to compensate by reading theory. I went through the weekly lectures diligently even as he went through hospitalization, cure, and ultimately passed away before I completed the course. He was a yoga practitioner and I have observed him with so much curiosity as a kid. Though he used to ask me sometime during my working years to learn yoga, he never made an attempt to teach me while I was much younger. Actually, being a Sri Vaishnava he didn’t teach me any of the traditional texts or slokas as well. It was not that he wasn’t interested, he just let us imbibe, read for ourselves, just assist us and kindle our curiosity even as we got busy with our own mundane existence of education, career, earning etc., I look at that as somewhat a reflection of what happens to a tradition, wh...
Read more