The Road to Bliss

In my opinion, one of the most peaceful places in India (and trust me, it is not easy to find a peaceful place in a crowded country like India) is in the innermost sanctum of the Tirupathi temple, nestled in the hills of Tirumala, in Andhra Pradesh, in South India. I am not really a religious person and I generally hate all pilgrimage temples as they have a tendency to be dirty, touristy and disappointing. However, there is something about Tirupathi. One cannot ignore the devotion, the faith that devotees show. People journey from far and wide to pay their respects to the Lord of the Seven Hills and so would we.

When my family and I lived in Bangalore, we would undertake this journey quite often. It would take five hours to drive there with two pit stops on the way for breakfast and lunch. We would leave at some ungodly hour of the morning, or so it always seemed to me, before the sun had even risen.

There would be the usual last minute arguments that we always had in our family. My father would be ready first while my mother tried to wake up my brother and I, in a manner that allowed no arguments. While I would shower, my mother would hammer away at my bathroom door, trying to get me to hurry up. Once I was out, I would get the music we would need for our road trip ready. Soon all our efforts would be directed towards trying to get my brother out of the bathroom. Once he had emerged, all red and steaming from the hot shower, he would proceed to assess all my selections of music and promptly change most of it. This would enrage me and I would begin to squabble. Meanwhile, my parents would have begun loading up the car.

Finally, after my brother and I managed to reach a suitable compromise, he would proceed to wear his shoes. My brother wearing his shoes was something so fascinating to watch that it actually requires its own paragraph. The way he went about it, it seemed to be an arduous task, requiring utmost skill and concentration, something best left only to the professionals. He pull on his socks with such the inifinite patience of a practiced, veteran monk, who has been contemplating the meaning of life for the past 40 years under a tree in the forest. All the while, my parents would be multitasking - handling the last minute packing, making sure the maid finished her work and left, getting me out of my music library, reading the morning newspaper and finishing their cup of tea. By the time, my brother got to tying his shoelaces, our family would be almost 15 minutes late from the time we had originally planned to leave, and my father, the lone long-suffering punctual soul in our family, would have reahed the end of his patience (not that his patience was very long) and yell at my brother to hurry him up. This was, needless to say, a well-practiced tactic, that never worked. My brother would look up and then look back down with such a calm demeanour and in what seemed like a deliberately slower manner, tie up his laces with such concentration and at the same time, convey his disdain for the barbarians hurrying him up.

Finally, after all this drama, we would be ready to leave. Before anyone's journey we had this tradition of saying a quick prayer at our family altar and embracing the one leaving (in this case, hugging each other in an overly melodramatic manner). And in that one minute in which we said our silent prayers, all was forgotten, all was forgiven and everything was fine. Then we would pile into the car altogether. My brother and my father would have their ritual argument over who would get to sit in the front seat while our driver looked on in amusement. And then, we would be on our way.

At first, no one spoke, no one played any music. Everyone was just lost in their own thoughts. Then as we got out of the city and unto the highway, we would turn on the radio and listen to whatever was playing until we drove out of range. After that, it would be yet another squabble for the music.

Approximately, an hour and an half after leaving the house we would reach our first pit stop - a highway restaurant/motel called Woody's, a little outside Kolar. We already knew what we wanted to have - Masala Dosa. After this little break, we would continue on our way. Again, we would have a period of silence. Only this time, the silence would be broken not by music but by a game of 20 Questions. For those of you who don't know this game,the objective is simple. One person thinks of a famous personality and then the other players have to ask him/her 20 yes or no questions about this personality and they have three attempts to guess the personality. Of course, the advantage of playing with your family is that they know you so well that the questions tend to be very obscure like, "Does this person appear on that show that we watch on that channel that you hate?" or even something like, "Is this person that you are thinking about related to usand visited our home recently?"

Eventually, we would tire of the game and silence would fall on the car again. Then as I would protest the silence and plead for some music to be played. My brother and I would be on one side, begging for 'our' music to be played while my father and our driver would be the other team, demanding music from their era to be played. Of course, there would ba a lot of verbal assaults on their age during this argument by my brother and I, while the other team would question the integrity of our music and question its status as music and not noise. Our driver would enjoy this squabble. He would join, hesitantly at first, but eventually he would get his way and we would play the music that he liked.

Our mother, was delightful fun on all these roadtrips. She never joined our squabble over the music because she would usually be asleep during those parts of our journey. During her naps, we would cruise along the highways at speeds of 160 km/hr (which is pretty fast for Indian roads) until she awoke and took one look at the speedometer. With a sleepy utterance of "आस्थे, आस्थे ।" (Slow down, slow down), she would go right back to sleep. This was repeated once every twenty minutes and it had an effect which lasted 5 minutes in total each time.

Once we reached Tirupati town at the foot of the Tirumala hills, it would be time for lunch and our second pit stop. Again we had a regular restaurant we visited and a regular lunch that we ate. It was all like a ritual. After lunch, we would pile into the car again to begin our ascent into the hills. This would take around an hour. Our attempts to play some music would immediately be squashed by our mother who would in her usual worried tone, tell us to shut up and let our driver concentrate while he drove around the sharp hairpin bends in the ascent. And usually, we would obey, lapsing into our own thoughts yet again.

Eventually we would reach the top - Tirumala town itself. Tirumala is a noisy, dirty, touristy little town that always seems to be bursting at the seams. People used to queue for miles along the city, actually in cages to get into the temple and inner sanctum, to walk past the 7 gates of Vaikuntam. And for what - a two second glimpse at an bejewelled idol and then a hard shove in the back to get people to move on in the line. Within these two seconds, people would cover a whole palete of emotions, from joy at finally reaching their long journey's end, to exultation at having finally been granted a vision of their beloved Govinda, to ecstacy, chagrin when the pushers push them on, deviousness when they try to con the pushers into letting them stay on for a second longer, anger when this tactic fails to work, resignation as they move on, and hope as they turn around to catch a glimpse of the Lord for the last time. All this happens in a timespan of just one minute. Now, of course, there are no more long queues and cages. Technology has made them redundant. Instead now the Lord's devotees are given a wristband stating the time of their 'darshan' and they are required to show up at the temple's gates at the said time. But the pushers still remain and so does the emotional rollercoaster.

I have had the good fortune to have been blessed with a viewing of one of the many other services. The one that I enjoy the most is the Abhishekam, that is the service wherein the Lord is bathed with buckets and buckets of milk and then massaged with sandalwood. It takes place early in the morning at around 2 or 3 a.m. but no one complains about this. It is well worth it if one gets to sit in the Lord's presence for almost an hour.

The inner sanctum is so peaceful and His presence is overwhelming. I had always planned a list of things that I wanted to say to the Lord when I saw him, but once you reach there, once you reach that inner sanctum, all words are lost. One loses track of one's thoughts amidst the chants of Om and Govinda. It is almost like a trance state with no thought.

On my last trip to the temple, I undertook an experiment. I was resolved to say my prayer in front of the Lord when I got there and finally, I realize why that is not possible. When you pray, you tend to close your eyes to concerntrate your thoughts on what you want to say, ask and thank for. But in Tirupathi, after having fought just to view the Lord, to get a split-second glimpse of him, you just can't close your eyes when you get there. For in the time when you might pray, the next time you open your eyes he may not be visible anymore. I appreciate my father's explanation for this phenomenon. According to him, the Lord knows what you need better than you do and therefore when you are in His presence, words and thoughts are no longer necessary. All you need is that calm overpowering reassurance which is what you get indeed.

People say that you only journey to Tirumala if the Lord has called you. You can plan all you want but if he hasn't called you, you will never reach him. He must call. When you reach the inner sanctum, a wonderful feeling of calm that envelops you (even despite the pushing crowds). A feeling that you have reached your journey's end and He will take care of things now. A feeling of such security and comfort that one can only feel when one is truly at home, like the feeling on gets in one's mother & father's embrace. And that's when you truly realize, or atleast I did, that through this whole journey together with my family, through all our squabbles, through all the masala dosas we ate to get here, to get this 30 second glimpse, none of those things mattered. Eventually, what mattered was that we were here together and of course, that emotion is too powerful to express so like most other emotions, it is lost in silence and never said.

And just for that small realization, that 30 second insight into your life, that tiny taste of true inner peace, it is well worth the trip. It is bliss.