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A few days ago when posting a picture of Arunachala hill in Tiruvannamalai (shown above) I had mentioned a saint who used to live on top of the mountain, who had stayed there for 18 years without taking food.
Mazar-i-Sharif will probably be familiar to those who are old enough to remember the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. It was the first Taliban city to fall to the US army, and subsequently became famous for a prison uprising in which a CIA officer was killed and an American named John Walker Lindh was found fighting with the Taliban.
On December 25th we celebrated Hanuman Jayanti at our ashram in Chennai, where the presiding deity is of Sri Panchamukha Hanuman. From morning till evening thousands of devotees visited for darshana of Lord Hanuman. Bhajans were sung by devotees, and prasadam was distributed to all of the guests throughout the day.
Here is a small story of an interesting meeting we recently had with a sadhu from Jharkhand named Hari Baba. He stays in a small village in Jharkhand, and was attending the annual Gita Yagya at Rambaba Ashram, near Jamshedpur. He is a very unique sadhu, always in a type of inner trance, not very aware of the outside around us.
Ma kichakeswari temple mentioned in the Mahabharata. It was destroyed completely to the ground by muslim invaders along with a number of other temples located together in the same temple complex. It lay in ruins for four hundred years and finally was rebuilt with pieces of the broken temples in the last century.
This is the amazing temple tank of the ancient Shiva Temple at Thiruvarur, location of the famous Tyagaraja Swamy deity which was brought from Indraloka by King Muchukunda. I have never seen a temple tank as large and beautiful as the one at Thiruvarur. Even though it is off the usual path of travel, anytime I go South I make an effort to visit this temple.
The water at Dhanushkodi is crystal clear, but the small waves are very forceful, and feel like you are being punched in the chest.
98 year old sadhu Brahma Chaitanya Das, who is known in Odisha as Chakratirtha Baba is visiting our temple in Chennai on his way to Rameswaram for tirtha yatra.
Did you know that Mayapur was once the capital of the Eastern Empire of India, and that the king’s palace lies in ruins a short walk from ISKCON Mayapur?
Just behind Chand Kazi’s samadhi are the ruins known as Ballal Dhipi, which even today no one really knows much about. If you ask locals they have no idea what it is or what it was. Up until 1980 it was a giant earthen mound 30 feet high, covered in grass. No one knew what was underneath.
This is an ancient Vetala deity worshipped in Goa at the village of Loliem, who is over 8 feet tall. Vetala are a type of mystical ghostly species of beings. A famous example of them occurs in the book Kathasaritsagara, in which a king tries to capture a Vetala, but each time the Vetala tells him a story with a riddle at the end. This occurs 25 times, and those 25 stories are the basis of much of the world’s folklore (Arabian nights, Panchatantra, etc.).
