Enjoy Venkatachala Nilayam in raaga Sindhubhairavi by Malladi Brothers
On Nov 20, 2013 my long time friend Madhusudhan and I climbed the Tirumala Hills. We started early in the morning at 6 AM, got to the foothills (Alipiri) by 630 and started our walk up. The steps were steeper than they were 15 years ago although there was no change to the steps themselves. We took a few breaks and managed to get to the first Gaali Gopuram in one and half hours. Then the walk was reasonably smooth with flat walkways and beautiful scenic valley views. The total 8 KM walk took us little over 3 and 1/2 hours.
Here is a nice Sepia picture of Lord Narasimhaswamy statue on our way to the first Gaali Gopuram.
On the way to Tirumala by walk
Just being in Tirumala is very beautiful, there is good music, vedic hymns and spiritual lectures on the mic throughout. It gave us a good feeling. We had to checkin our Smartphones and Shoes at the counter before entering the queue complex.
Since we walked all the way, we received a token to take a special queue reserved for pedestrians who climbed the hills by foot. Unfortunately we didn’t know that this queue may not be faster than the regular open queue (Sarva Darsan) and definitely not faster than 300 rupees queue. Luckily, between the two of us, we had plenty to talk about while waiting in these jail-like-cages called “Vaikuntam” (Heaven) queue complex. If heaven is as bad as this queue complex no one would want to go to heaven.
We were locked up in these cages for about 3 to 4 hours and finally we were let out around 230 pm. We walked along may twists and turns to get to the sanctum of Lord Sri Venkateswara. The straight-line from the entrance of the queue to the Sanctum is probably 100 meters long. When you take this “twisted” path, it is probably around 500 meters long.
That 30 seconds spent in front of the main temple and seeing the beautiful statue, listening to the “Om Namo Venkatesaya” mantra repeating in the mic made us completely forget all the nonsense we had to go through to get there. It was blissful.
Sri Satya Sai Baba often says “A pleasure is an interval between two pains”. I felt that was very applicable to this trip of ours. We enjoyed the walk (albeit with some hiccups), we felt the pain of sitting in the queue complex for a long time, we had blissful darsan of Lord Sri Venkateswara and then we had trouble getting Laddu prasadam, getting our phones and shoes back from the “Cloak” room. Pleasure, pain, pleasure, pain…the cycle continues.
On the way up, each step we took made us realize how horribly out of shape our bodies were. We both realized that we need to workout more regularly. We also had an idea to come back and do this walk in a few weeks from now and see if our bodies do better next time.
Enjoy Kurai Onrum Illai by Anuradha Narayanan
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