Ulsavam Musings...

Some fifty years earlier when I was first taken to that temple my paternal grandmom quickly wrapped a towel round my shorts to make me comply with the man-made dress code at the temple that was dispensed to us in the name of the Lord himself.  

Fifty years later we did the same with our twin nine year old sons, quite like the hundreds of many other faithfuls that had come to see the ulsavam at the Sri PadmanabhaSwamy temple.  Well, OK not all of them were perhaps faithfuls.  Same difference.  Define a faithful to me unambiguously before you join issues with me on the extent of faith of all those.

Lest anyone be in doubt on where I come out on this matter of Faith, I am a big believer in God in any form.  I am not sure what God is supposed to do, what, if any, am I supposed to do for Him and what my relationship with Him ought to be.  But I am convinced that the Lord exists.  Further, I am convinced that all that we do is His bidding.  I also turn to Him routinely for various transactional benefits.

I have had my own share of experiences at key moments in life that for want of better explanations would pass off for miracles. I realise that it tricky for me to say that because that would make me appear to lay claim to the Lord's blessings that others may not have savoured.  But let us leave it at that for now.  You can take my word in good faith or just ignore it as my hallucination.

The principal agenda for everyone assembled there was seeking the Lord's blessings, the Lord being Sri Padmanabha Swamy, the presiding deity and his two other incarnations Sri Naramsimha and Sri Krishna.

For some it may even have been an ostensible reason for being there because what one witnessed there was a small social gathering too.

Most people seemed to know each other.  This is where the city of Trivandrum appears to have not lost its quaintness. Every year many of its residents leave for the larger cities in search of livelihoods, careers, even fame and fortune, changing the composition of the population permanently, irreversibly.  A few migrants from elsewhere take their place in an ever growing wave of urbanization.  Yet everyone including those that remained and those that had moved in, all seemed to know each other in spite of all the new-fangled media of infotainment that elsewhere in the country seemed to be making turning neighbours into strangers.
 

Many among those gathered at the temple greeted each other warmly, even intimately.  Some of them were explaining they had been absent for an extended while because they had been visiting an offspring in Bangalore or Delhi. Much news was exchanged. 

There were young men and women throwing me back to my own youth forty years earlier.  Mine was a very different world though. It was a world of cold war, oil shocks, Mrd G’s dirigisme that was driven across the country from Delhi in the name of centralized planning, and Sakhavu Achyuta Menon’s dias non and the hushed ripples on campus of the secret war that Comrade Ajitha’s compatriots were waging in the hills of Wayanad against the establishment.  

On the sands of the temple a very religious looking young man standing near me was debriefing his friends about a difficult encounter that his friend had had with a young lady who had apparently slapped him (the friend) over the latter's inappropriate attempt to win her affinity.

As I stood there taking in these sights and sounds, the thought that kept coming back to my mind was this.  In all these fifty years, the faces had changed.  Political circumstances had changed, making the erstwhile ruler of Travancore further remote from and less relevant to the rough and tumble of contemporary power politics than he had been in the seventies, soon after Mrs G had abolished their privy purse, the compensation that the princes had been awarded for letting their princely states accede to the Union of India.

But to the faithful the temple and its ulsavam remained a central piece of their social life even today, a source of much conviviality.  That in a sense seemed to be the spiritualism that the religion tried to imbue in the faithful through the institution of the temple as a place of community worship:  Having been born into this world being caught in the web of life is inevitable.  But weave every bit of your life around the Lord.  Implant the Lord in your heart however perfectly as you can, however imperfectly you might.  You might then hope to be liberated from the cycle of birth and death someday.

As I stood reflecting on these thoughts, trying to dissolve some recent worldly pain of my own making, I heard the distant rolling thud of the kettle drum heralding the arrival of the Lord.  The conversations stopped and all eyes turned to the direction of the sound, eagerly awaiting the sighting of the Lord on the tall, broad, spacious, imposing circumambulatory path of the temple, all hewn in eternal stone.

Nanni.Namaskaaram

I wrote this piece too on April 4, 2015 and could not post it as a blog again.