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| Painting the main door of the Praharam |
The annual Brahmotsavam festival is always celebrated at Nungambakkam Agatheeswarar Temple in a very grand manner. In connection with this festival which is going to be held for the current year from July 07 to 19, 2013, our team of volunteers took up the assignment of giving the Temple a festive look through white-washing and painting.
After returning from Innambur, our coordinator Shri Ramachandran, visited this temple to make a study of the work requirements. Accordingly, the Hereditary Trustees of the Temple, Shri Kalyana Raghavan & Shri Radhakrishnan made available all the material required much in advance.
Our team members started assembling from 7.30am onwards and within one hour the number of volunteers swelled to more than 70. Our work mainly involved painting and white washing the walls of the main praharam and also the Sannadhis of Adhikara Nandhi, Vinayagar, Balasubramaniar, Durga-Lakshmi-Saraswathi, Kasi Viswanathar, Annapurneswari, Bairavar, Navagrahams, besides the Yagasalai and the madapalli.
The painting of grill gates at the entrance and white washing the entire stretch of wall from the main road to the temple Rajagopuram was also done.
The usual cleaning of the inner praharam using water jet was also done. Besides, lady volunteers cleaned the Pooja Vessels and the Thiruvasi of various Sannadhis to give them a bright look. By 6 pm we packed up for the day.
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| On Completion |
Shri Madanagopal, Executive Officer of the Temple, was very appreciative of our efforts. He interacted with all the volunteers and gave us quite a few valuable tips and suggestions for our future uzhavarappani work. He also duly invited all of us for the Brahmotsavam function
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| Mayil Anna with the Temple Gurukkal,Trustees and a few of our volunteers |
This time we had a very popular personality, who visited us during our work, remained with us for about an hour and encouraged us throughout. He is none other than Shri Mayilsamy, who is well known to the Tamils as a comedy actor. But not many know that he is very pious and an ardent devotee of Lord Arunachaleswara. We have seen him involving himself in Annadhanam activities at Thiruvannamalai on all Pournami days. When we had gone to Thiruvannamalai for the Chitra Pournami festival(Refer our earlier post Chitra Pournami) we had befriended him. At that time we invited him to visit us during one of our programmes to have a first hand idea of our field work and he readily dropped in despite his busy schedule.
We have been regulars at this temple for the last four years. But this year we were very much pained to see the near-dry condition of the temple tank, which contained very little water that too only in small puddles. No doubt, the scorching heat in Chennai is continuing for more than a month after the end of Agni Nakshatram and this temple tank, which has been serving as a recharge point for the wells in the surrounding localities has taken its toll. We only pray that Varuna Baghawan fills up this tank at least to a reasonable level within the next 10 days so that all the dry patches vanish, when the festivities begin.
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| A section of our volunteers |
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