My Head Tonsured - DHAMASTHALA - A Holy Place

I know I am back to square one. Not been able to post a lot of happenings in my life out here. Busy, lazy, just running out of time whatever excuse I give, I apologize for the delay. In this blog, I would like to update about my drive to Dharmasthala. It was a long due visit as I had offered my hair for Lord Manjunatha.

It was Komesh, Harish and myself who decided to drive down to this place. We left around 10 pm on 13th September (Saturday) and reached at 6 am on 14th September (Sunday). The place was jam packed and no rooms to stay. We decided to not waste time by searching for room and utilized the common toilet at the temple. Very well maintained and very cordial people at Dharmasthala.
After the quick call of the nature, we walked to the tonsuring centre and you won’t believe this there were atleast 10000 people waiting in the queue to get tonsured. Started in the queue around 7 am and reached inside the center at around 10 am in the morning. Quickly got my hair tonsured for just Rs.20/- for the blades and 10 for the token.


After that we had to go to the river Nethravathi for a bath and that was about ½ a kilometer from the temple. Took the car and went out there and it was a really refreshing experience. The water was so chill that we almost froze in that and to add on to the misery, it was pouring cats and dogs.
We reached back to the temple around 12.45 and we almost got a heart attack after seeing the crowd at the temple. There were at least 200,000 people and the queue was snaking all the way outside the temple premises.
I had personally given up hopes and decided to travel back to Bangalore without visiting the temple. And there happens the greatest miracle of my life. There is this security person who comes out of the temple and enquires us, if we have visited the temple. And once we gave him the negative (saying the crowd is too much), he just takes us personally, straight into the temple and we get the special darshan in just 15-20 minutes. Amazing right! Just small ways of God showing up in my life.

We start back at around 2 am back to Bangalore. And this time around we reached the Sakleshpur Ghat area around 4 in the evening and it was a very heavenly experience here. We saw almost 30-40 streams of water just on the road. Komesh and Harish were simply excited and just forced me to stop at every other stream to jump into it and take photographs.


Those stops delayed us reaching Bangalore. We reached around 2 am on Monday morning (15th September) and all I remember is crashing into bed as I had to get back to work at 8 am.

Some more photos for you to watch.