thatsme

Prologue
It was as uncertain as the Indian Monsoon…
I’m not talking about Indian batting…
It was as thrilling as a Hitchcockian whodunit…..
I’m not talking about the current Ashes series…
It was just pure adrenalin rush…
I’m not talking about any of those AXN programs…
Its real…
Its raw…
Its wild…
Its fun….
3 weeks of planning…
2 postpones…
1 cancellation…
2 candidates dropping at the last moment…
One full day of nerves….
And to top it all…the trip hasn’t yet started then...and yet we’ve done it again…all over…
The story
It was not till Friday morning, did we come to know that Mastan and Mahender would be missing the trip, as both of them had some high priority work at hand, in the weekend. That didn’t dampen our spirits...We still had good company In Murali and Pradeep...Murali and I started from MGBS at 9:30 in the night. The journey was not the comfortable of all, with some bumpy roads and a cacophonous bunch of girls right behind our seat...Not at least till we got a glimpse of what could be called as one the few visuals that can be worth watching even at 3:30 AM in the mid-night. The bus took us through a labyrinth of Ghat roads with a spectacular view of the water falling from the Dam gates.
That visual almost drove our sleep away and it was 5 O’clock in the morning by the time we reached Srisailam. We immediately booked a room in a chowltry for ourselves and got into a nap very quickly.

Pradeep’s phone call woke us from the deep slumber. He joined us in the Chowltry and we refreshed ourselves with a shower and started off from the room. We reached the Sanctum sanatorium of Lord Mallikharjuna Swamy by 10 O’clock .The temple can be approached by two ways, each of which is flanked on either side by the customary Hawkers trying to lure the pilgrims into buying their wares. The temple complex was approximately of the size of a cricket ground with the temples of Raja Rajeswara Swamy, Raja Rajeshwari Devi, Vinayaka, Bhramaraba Devi and Lord Mallikharjuna. The temple complex also had a Mirror hall where the Lord is believed to have his sleep every night. We had the “Darshan” and bought “Prasadam” afterwards.

We then had our lunch at the chowltry and moved to the next phase of the trip, i.e. “site seeing”. We got ourselves into the State run RTC Site Seeing special bus and the first stop was the “Saakshi Ganapathi temple”. It is believed that Lord Ganesha himself maintains a record of the devotees visiting srisailam. We moved on to “the Hatakeshwara temple”, where Lord Shiva is believed to have blessed a potter and enlightened him. The Siva Lingam was symbolically represented on a potter’s wheel.

The next stop was the ‘Phaaladhara-Panchadhaara’. It was a steep valley-like geography, which could be accessed by a stairway. Small streamlets of water ooze out of the rocks, creating an Ideal ambience for meditation. It is believed that the legendary Saint “Shankaracharya” himself constructed a shrine here and used to meditate there.

We then reached the “Sikharam” by the evening. The “Sikharam” is the highest point of the Nallamala hills. It is believed that anybody who gets a glimpse of the “Garbha Gudi Gopuram”, from the Sikharam from in between the horns of Nandi, will have no re-birth.

The last of the stops was the “Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy Project” also called the “Srisailam Dam”. The dam stood tall against the background of lush green forests of the Nallamala hills, providing a spectacular panorama of beauty, glory and grandeur of Mother Nature. The view of the water flowing down from an astounding 800 ft and ricocheting to almost 700 ft with a horizontal range of approximately the same distance as the height and transforming into a gigantic misty wave of frothing water, left us spell bound. We managed to get a view from the top of the dam by bribing a person there. The sun already slipped beneath the western horizon, when we started strolling along the road towards the base of the dam, against gusty wind filled with the torrent of mist rising from the river water, slapping right across our faces. As we moved nearer to the base of the dam, the sound of the flow of water reverberated in our ears creating in us, a strange feeling of Euphoria mixed with apprehension. The view of the crescent moon disappearing intermittently in the clouds of the mist, only added to the beauty of the whole backdrop. We felt like we really had a sumptuous treat for our senses, satisfying us thoroughly. We returned to the boarding point, rather reluctantly and got into a bus, which took us back to Srisailam.

The small temple town’s streets were still awake and we had a quick dinner at a small hotel. We returned to the chowltry, after booking the tickets for our return journey. Our discussions went long into the night, covering a gamut of topics ranging from World politics to International Cricket, before we slipped into a reasonably good sleep.