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Every so often echoes of the Vedic past can be detected in the most obscure of items. Such is the case with the simple ‘piggy bank’. Was this staple of childhood nostalgia just a cute animal chosen at random or is there a deeper hidden meaning? If you promise not to squeal we’ll give you the clues.
Today we had the good fortune to go to Sri Marundeeswarar temple in Thiruvanmiyur. Valmiki, the author of Ramayana used to worship Lord Shiva here. In this spot Lord Shiva taught the science of herbal medicine to the great sage Agastya, so devotees come here to pray for being cured of various diseases.
Its been a while since we posted an update about the protected cows at our ashram in Odisha. Some people have been asking us, “How does Baladeva the bull calf look today now that he is all grown up?” Let me share some photos of the cows along with the new goshala we built for them, which gives them more space and a bit more comfort.
Today I was going through a file of old letters and I came across the first notice we printed for distribution in Palani in 1998. It seems to still be in good shape even after 23 years.
This is a picture I took 15 years ago of a stone “coin” or tablet which was being kept at an ashram in the forests of Odisha. The sadhu who kept it said he used to find many of these in the river, but he lost all of them in the super cyclones of the 1970’s and 1990’s when the ashram was under water.
Three years ago today Ram Mohan Das departed from this world. He had spent a few of his last years staying in our Panchamukha Hanuman temple in Chennai, though for the last few months of his life he went to stay in Kumbhakonam.
These pictures are of a sadhu named Harinama Pracharaka Baba. He was 106 years old when I met him in 2014. Recently I heard that he had entered samadhi two or three years back in Jharkhand.
Last week was the famous Ratha Yatra chariot festival, which is held each year for Lord Jagannatha in Puri. At first the government had cancelled the religious festival, but as the deadline approached the Supreme Court relented and gave permission for the Puri temple to conduct the festival without the presence of the public. Likewise, Jagannatha temples throughout the state were informed to conduct all the rituals for the festival within their respective temple compounds in a scaled down manner, without the presence of the public.
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.
