Sunday, October 24, 2010

Pollachi - Aliyar Temple

October 21st Thursday – Thiruvannamalai

It was our relative’s wedding in Samayapuram. Mom had made great plans of waking up at 5:30 am, going to the temple and then going for the wedding and meeting all relatives. But I snoozed the alarm, woke up pretty late, checked mails, and was at the verge of cancelling even sharad poornima girivalam. I wanted to go to thiruvannamalai straight from wedding, but was not comfortable traveling with jewels and silk saree. So we ended up cancelling the wedding and after packing a dinner of chappati sabji, we boarded a bus after 2 pm and reached Thiruvannamalai around 9 pm.

Swathi Sri
We booked a room for a night in Swathi Sri. The guy at the counter was a BE BL. The moment he learnt the institute I graduated from, he said, we graduates ought to pay more when I told him that he is under-quoting his income. He was charging us 450 for room rent and 150 for deposit, while in the bill, he exchanged the rates and showed us all other bills with the same cheating stating he was saving us 10% of service tax. Well whatever, I just wanted to collapse. So we had our dinner late and woke up at 2:30 am.

October 22rd Friday

Girivalam
We started our girivalam after main gopuram darshan at 3:40 am and after 3 breaks (at Kubera linga, breakfast, coffee) we reached the hotel again after 8 am. We put our slippers there and went for darshan. I wish, I could have at least a 15-30 mins peaceful darshan in the sanctum sanctorum some time. We came out, got refreshed in Swathi Sri, boarded a bus to Salem. Wikimapia showed us various routes to reach Aliyar Temple of Consciousness and we decided the board the bus that started first.

Thiruvannamalai to Salem
Never realized Yercaud was on the way. It was picturesque. Really beautiful. Hazy grey blue mountains on both sides, green fields, gentle breeze, mild sunshine, with pitter patter of drizzle, it was a pleasant journey. We reached Erode from Salem and boarded a bus to Pollachi from Erode. It was after 9 when we reached Arivu Thirukoil. We booked the beds instead of room. I tried to remain awake for Sharad poornima, but I ended up sleeping.

October 23rd Saturday

Aliyar – Azhagu Azhagu
I woke up at 5:30 am, took bath, wore a dark green garden saree and came to the Mani mandapam for the 6 am meditation, but I missed it, by few minutes and the gates were locked. It was good in a way, I was wonderstruck with the beauty of the hillock partially hidden by mist and clouds, with the rising sun with its orange red hues pervading the eastern sky. The women in our dorm were on a 3 day Vazhndhu Kaattuvom Program, sent by the state government. The instructor met us on the way and asked us to join and we ended up going for early morning exercise. He said, if we are interested, we could enroll and after a few formalities, we were formally enrolled in the program. Luckily for breakfast we had wheat gruel, so I could eat.

Monkey Falls and Dam
A Swaraj Mazda was arranged for us, by the office and we reached Monkey Falls, and enjoyed the scenary. The gentle downpour and constant roar of waterfalls was energizing. Wish, I were born a guy, I could have taken bath and got thoroughly soaked in the pristine pure water. 2 govt employee guys were taking my snap without my permission near the falls and in the class session. We returned for our 3:40 pm session, where we were taught Kaya Kalpa.

In 2008, my school mate who had rahu in his 7th house had taught me this, after I insisted so much. I wanted to learn the whole set of exercises then, but only now, I got the chance. Now I really realized the truth that I should never learn anything for free and that I should learn good things from able gurus with proper explanation. I missed practicing it for 2 years, now that am certified, I know the benefits and am enthused to do it daily. After Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali yoga, institute GS’ surya namaskars and yet another different set of yogas, pranic healing and vipassana, now this is a new method, kind of same, yet quite different. My only confusion is that in pranic healing, I was asked to remove my pushparagam and meditate (because it will cause energy imbalance) while here, my instructor, says it is alright.

October 24th Sunday
We woke up at 5:15, and I missed my 6 am meditation again, because I wanted to have tea, and I ended up going to Omkara Mandapam. I had missed packing my kurta, and was embarrassed to meditate and exercise in my long dark scarlet red skirt and tight T-shirt. Wish I had got my white kurta. After seeing the museum, Vethathri Mahrishi’s room upstairs, we finished all components of the 3 day course, got our certificates and started from ashram after 2 pm. The instructor and one coimbatore lady volunteer adopted me as their daughter and I was overwhelmed with their kindness and kisses on my forehead and blessings.

Pollachi-Palani-Trichy
We reached Palani around 5 pm, and decided to go to Dandayuthapani Swamy temple as well. We took the train kind of thing while going up, had a darshan of Raja alankar Murugan and took the rope car back. Wish I had more time, though we could sit down for special darshan, it was again only for few minutes. I had rava dosa in saravana bhavan and we reached home at 3 am.

I missed 3 vocal classes, got so much to catch up now. Lost my mobile charger in Thiruvannamalai and my mobile is down without charge.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Atlas Shrugged

I had read this book years before, but now I was forced to read it again for an essay competition. Ayn Rand is too rajasic for me. Yes, most of what she says makes sense. But to generalize all Indian sadhus as mystic mucks is a bit antagonizing. Am wondering what she would say, to the current organizations, which in addition to making profit (skinning of customers as she would say) have CSR to shoulder, with climate change, sustainability, inclusive growth and green production. The money speech of Francisco d’Anconia made absolute sense. The following of some of the lines that caught my attention in this hurried second reading.

"What you think you think is an illusion created by your glands, your emotions and, in the last analysis, by the content of your stomach."

"That gray matter you're so proud of is like a mirror in an amusement park which transmits to you nothing but distorted signals from a reality forever beyond your grasp."

"The more certain you feel of your rational conclusions, the more certain you are to be wrong. Your brain being an instrument of distortion, the more active the brain the greater the distortion."

"The giants of the intellect, whom you admire so much, once taught you that the earth was flat and that fallacies, not of achievements."

"The more we know, the more we learn that we know nothing."

"Only the crassest ignoramus can still hold to the old-fashioned notion that seeing is believing. That which you see is the first thing to disbelieve."

"A scientist knows that a stone is not a stone at all. It is, in fact, identical with a feather pillow. Both are only a cloud formation of the same invisible, whirling particles. But, you say, you can't use a stone for a pillow? Well, that merely proves your helplessness in the face of actual reality."

"You see, Dr. Stadler, people don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue—a highly intellectual virtue—out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt."

Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?"

"I've never despised luxury," he said, "yet I've always despised those who enjoyed it. I looked at what they called their pleasures and it seemed so miserably senseless to me—after what I felt at the mills.

"Are you saying," he asked slowly, "that I rose in your estimation when you found that I wanted you?"
"Of course."
"That's not the reaction of most people to being wanted."
"It isn't."
"Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.".

I'm Mrs. Taggart. I'm the woman in this family now."
"That's quite all right," said Dagny. "I'm the man.”
"We are at the dawn of a new age," said James Taggart, from above the rim of his champagne glass.
"We are breaking up the vicious tyranny of economic power. We will set men free of the rule of the dollar. We will release our spiritual aims from dependence on the owners of material means. We will liberate our culture from the stranglehold of the profit-chasers. We will build a society dedicated to higher ideals, and we will replace the aristocracy of money by—the aristocracy of pull

Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire
philosophy of life.
Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself.
You're the man who's spent his life shaping matter to the purpose of his mind. You're the man who would know that just as an idea unexpressed in physical
action is contemptible hypocrisy, so is platonic love—and just as physical action unguided by an idea is a fool's self-fraud, so is sex when cut off from one's code of values.

Now you're willing to do it at the price of accepting the position of a criminal and
the risk of being thrown in jail at any moment—for the sake of keeping in existence a system which can be kept going only by its victims, only by the breaking of its own laws."
Reminded me of the court scene in the movie Guru.


So he waited, holding his love in the place of the hope which he had no right to hold.
From then on, people helped Wesley Mouch to advance, for the same reason
as that which had prompted Uncle Julius: they were people who believed that mediocrity was safe.

"I know that everything is relative and that nobody can know anything and that reason is an illusion and that there isn't any reality.

"Mountains . . ." said Gilbert Keith-Worthing, with satisfaction.
"It is a spectacle of this kind that makes one feel the insignificance of man.' What is this presumptuous little bit of rail, which crude materialists are so proud of building—compared to that eternal grandeur? No more than the basting thread of a seamstress on the hem of the garment of nature. If a single one of those granite giants chose to crumble, it would annihilate this train."

Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no
matter how small or in what form, the sense of an activity going step by step to some chosen end across a span of time

But the looters—by their own stated theory—are in desperate, permanent, congenital need and at the blind mercy of matter Eddie?—we're on a dead planet, like
the moon, where we must move, but dare not stop for a breath of feeling or we'll discover that there is no air to breathe.

the belief that disasters are one's natural fate, to be borne, not fought. I can't accept submission. I can't accept helplessness. I can't accept renunciation. So long as there's a railroad left to run, I'll run it."

we were taught that some things belong to God and others to Caesar. Perhaps their God would permit it. But the man you say we're serving—he docs not permit it. He permits no divided allegiance, no war between your mind and your body, no gulf between your values and your actions, no tributes to Caesar. He permits no Caesars."
To me, she was not a person and not . . .not a woman. She was the railroad. And I didn't think that anyone would ever have the audacity to look at her in any other way.

"Any man who's afraid of hiring the best ability he can find, is a cheat who's in a business where he doesn't belong. To me—the foulest man on earth, more contemptible than a criminal, is the employer who rejects men for being too good. That's what I've always thought and—say, what are you laughing at?"

. . . There is reason, she thought, why a woman would wish to cook for a man . . . oh, not as a duty, not as a chronic career, only as a rare and special rite in symbol of . . . but what have they made of it, the preachers of woman's duty? . . . The castrated performance of a sickening drudgery was held to be a woman's proper virtue—while that which gave it meaning and sanction was held as a shameful sin . . . the work of dealing with grease, steam and slimy peelings in a reeking kitchen was held to be a spiritual matter, an act of compliance with her moral duty—while the meeting of two bodies in a bedroom was held to be a physical indulgence, an act of surrender to an animal instinct, with no glory, meaning or pride of spirit to be claimed by the animals involved.

Only if some one is there, i cook elaborate meals, experimenting with various recipes from internet. Left to myself, am too lazy to cook most of the days, and even if i do, i end up eating green things, horse gram, mostly fruits for dinner and veggies, noodles and things that can be cooked in less than 5 minutes.
Just yes'day i had to listen to a 3 hour crib session over phone of yet another husband who was complaining about his wife, who never cooked food for him in time. So much hoopla over food.


"I did love you once," she said dully, "but it wasn't what you wanted. I loved you for your courage, your ambition, your ability. But it wasn't real, any of it."

"You fear the man who has a dollar less than you, that dollar is rightfully his, he makes you feel like a moral defrauder. You hate the man who has a dollar more than you, that dollar is rightfully yours, he makes you feel that you are morally defrauded. The man below is a source of your guilt, the man above is a source of your frustration. You do not know what to surrender or demand, when to give and when to grab, what pleasure in life is rightfully yours and what debt is still unpaid to others—you struggle to evade, as 'theory,' the knowledge that by the moral standard you've accepted you are guilty every moment of your life, there is no mouthful of food you swallow that is not needed by someone somewhere on earth—and you give up the problem in blind resentment, you conclude that moral perfection is not to
be achieved or desired, that you will muddle through by snatching as snatch can and by avoiding the eyes of the young, of those who look at you as if self-esteem were possible and they expected you to have it. Guilt is all that you retain within your soul—and so does every other man, as he goes past, avoiding your eyes. Do you wonder why your morality has not achieved brotherhood on earth or the good will of man
to man?

Random females with causeless incomes flitter on trips around the globe and return to deliver the message that the backward peoples of the world demand a higher standard of living.

What permits any insolent beggar to wave his sores in the face of his betters and to plead for help in the tone of a threat?

Pattambi - Kottakal

Pattambi was familiar surname for me till 2010. Then I happened to meet K after almost 10 years and he asked me to go for Kottakal ayurvedic treatment, that too on a shasti. I missed 4 shastis after that and finally decided to go on 29th. I really do not know till now, why K mentioned, book a train till Pattambi. He even gave the address of one of the lodges - Rajadhani, just near the railway station. So I did not heed anyone’s words when they said, that I need to alight at Tirur, and not Pattambi to go to Kottakal. I had even mailed Kottakal and even when had replied that the nearest station was Tirur, I adamantly thought, probably K was referring to a Kottakal Ayurveda Sala in Pattambi and that is where I need to go and not Kottakal.

The train was at 4:45 am, so we boarded the 2:45 am bus from home and reached the station 1 hour ahead of scheduled departure. I was so hungry around 5 am that I bought Britannia chocolate cake to munch at that hour. Mom and I promptly collapsed on our LBs once the train started moving and just as we were in deep slumber we found a family with 2 boisterous kids in our compartment. Man, they never let us sleep even for a second, and we were exhausted after a sleepless night since Tuesday.

Train Journey

Once we crossed Coimbatore, man it was sheer peace. There was a stretch of grey blue mountains and an awesome view of meadows. It was all greenery everywhere, with gay little flowers, odd peacocks and peahens, a small rivulet here and there, lush green paddy fields, a rush of plantain gardens, rows of coconut trees, it was so ecstatically beautiful, everywhere one looked.

Mangalore express stopped at most stations for 30 minutes to 1 hour, which seemed to be an interminable wait, especially the 1 hour wait in Palakkad. We alighted at Pattambi close to 3 pm and after couple of phone calls, discovered that K did not mean Pattambi.

Pattambi-Valanchery-Kottakal

We boarded a bus to Valanchery. It was a little more than a 1 hour drive, a picturesque one nevertheless. Everywhere we saw burqa clad pretty faces, so fresh and nubile. We had no problems finding the bus, since everyone there was very helpful and the conductors were crying the names of the destinations aloud. From Valanchery, we boarded another bus to Kottakal which took less than 1 hour.
Our conductor was over helpful and he made us get down at the charity hospital instead of our intended place. So we had to take an auto to go to AVS square. Things got over there in a jiffy. I took bath there and we started our long trip back home.

Kottakal-Palakkad-Salem-Trichy

Just nearby AVS, we had Changuvatty busstop. We boarded a bus to Mallapuram sub bus depot. We were famished, but I wanted to eat full meals with kerala boiled rice. However, obviously that was not to be available. So I ended up buying veg samosa and masala parrupu vadai from a bakery which was a blunder mistake, for it made mom sick.

We reached Palakkad in the darkness in 2-3 hours. And another bus to Salem, which we reached around 2:30 am. Buses to Trichy were frequent from Salem and we reached Trichy around 6 am and we were back home little after 7 am.

The lush green paddy fields, picturesque scenery everywhere, the nubile muslim girls with their heads covered, the charming disarray of cluttered, shining shops full of knickknacks, the winding roads, hills to border those roads, with gorgeous valleys and streams and bridges, man Kerala is God’s own country indeed.