You discover new things every day.

Another Sunday at Kerala, but it has been raining like hell and I am wondering how I
would be able to keep my promise to my son to take him to see the temple elephant.
Luckily, rain subsides by around 4PM and the 3 of us ride down to the temple.

I don't know whether I mentioned it in any previous posts, but the temple elephant (Premshankar) has been in 'musth' for a long time - close to 2 months. We did find
its activities strange - not standing still, swaying here and there, a little aggression
etc, but did not know that all was not well with it, till a temple employee cautioned
us from going too near the elephant.

So, me and my wife sit away from it on the stone walkway and while we talk, our
son is having fun running around on the sandy courtyard, playing with sand etc.
After sometime, he is bored and wants to walk around the temple. We walk around
on the stone walkway and take in sights which we missed earlier.

We never noticed this small idol of Krishna under a tree, playing the flute, inspite of
doing the rounds a few times. Maybe the tree hid him from us. I take a couple of snaps
and we walk on.


A close-up of the Kaarvarnan (the dark-one as Krishna is referred to).


As we walk a full circle, we come to the main entrance of the temple, where we come
across an intricately designed multi-tiered lamp (vilakku) having provision to light
numerous wicks. Also, alongside we see the thulabharam (weighing scale) which is
used by devotees to make offerings to the deity.


The devotees sit on one of the scales, while they are weighed against the offering of
their choice - bananas, jaggery, etc and the offering equalling their weight is offered
to the temple. Recently actress Nayantara had come down to the Chettikulangara
temple near my place and had a thulabharam done as an offering.

This gives me an excuse to post a snap of Nayanthara. :-)


We notice that most of the temple premises is in a sad state of disrepair & seems to
be in dire need of maintenance. There are weeds growing high near the wall which
need to be cleared. Not just for cleanliness, but also for safety reasons because you
never know what reptile is hiding there. Especially because they have these small
platforms with idols at various places & I see people going to pray at each one of them.

Also the platforms around the base of trees are crumbling. It won't cost much to have
a mason repair them and spruce them up. Will make them presentable and improve
the looks and ambience of the whole premises.

Ofcourse, instead of spending time/money/effort on maintaining their neighborhood
temple, our guys are more worried about some old/historical temple in some distant
part of India, for which they are ready to kill/die based on the exhortations of some
wily politician, who is only bothered about coming to power.

When will we ever learn ?