Jingle Bells

One of my room mate who has joined us recently wanted to visit a temple in the city. Its long time I have visited a temple. There is a lake near by the temple and that motivated me for waking up early in the morning and set off.

The temple has a small shrine of Lord Balaji and located at a place called Chilkur. It took about 40 mins by the city bus to reach the place. I expected some crowd there as it was an auspicious day for the God. There was not much crowd so without any hassles we had our darshan in few minutes. Devotees believe that the Lord can fulfill any genuine desires. So the devotees when they visit the temple for the first time has to do 9 pradarshans (walk around the shrine) and when their request is serviced they have to comeback and make 108 such rounds as a gesture of thanks giving. So there will always be considerable crowd walking around the sanctum sanctorum. My room mate wanted to make his 9 rounds and so I too joined him (I did not have a wish though :)) observing the things around. There were verses like "Don't close your eyes at the darshan", "Concentrate on God and not on the number". The funny thing was I saw few people doing their jogging, fast walking and rash walking too through the crowd (wonder what was the hurry!). I also heard that majority of the requests will be for VISA stamping and passing/scoring high in examinations. So the crowd was pretty youthful.

Then had a walk around the small shopping stalls which is customary in all such temples in India. They sell small statutes of Gods and many miniature ornamental items. The place generally looks colourful for the variety of things and the tarpaulin roofings. This is one of the items that attracted my attention.

Visiting the lake was my interest and we had a walk along the shore. I could spot variety of birds and had few other interesting things to shoot. Spent about an hour there. The bird snaps did not come great in my p&s. May be I will visit the place after I upgrade my camera.