Each full moon there is scurry of activity all around the mountain with hordes of merchants coming into town with their array of various bric-a-brac, fortune telling robots, green coconuts, holy pictures and books, fruit stands, candyfloss wagons and all the rest of the paraphernalia.
It's all for the crowds of Pilgrims who come to Arunachala specifically to do Poornima (full moon) pradakshina. Shrines around the Hill are given a special smarten-up, are beautifully garlanded and readied for a lot of admiring looks from devout, pious pilgrims. This nice Lingam shrine is a small, rather insignificant one; but for Poornima, definitely done up to the nines, and capable of stopping anyone in their tracks!
2 comments:
How handy for the business people - their livlihood is not dependent on a human being visiting at a certain time, but by the clockwork full moon!
Even if it gale force winds and storms, the crowds still come. Many of the pilgrims finish work in Madras (or elsewhere) get on the bus, travel for 5 hours (or more), get off, do pradakshina and then get right back on the bus, go home by bus (another 5 hours) and go to work the next morning. Such devotion.
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