Thirunelvelli.

The first thing that comes to the mind at the mention of the name of the deep south city 'Thirunelvelli' is the delicacy it is famous for---Halwa.

No , I wasn't confined in the cramped spaces for 12 hours in a night train in quest of that ,mouth watering halwa, but to visit Nava Thirupathi's and other Divya desams , i.e Vishnu temples that have been sanctified by the presence of Aazhwars , the mystic poets of yore.

Has 'Jal' ,the watered down cyclone from its super cyclone status to an ordinary one threatening TN for the past fewdays, deposited some of its 'Jal' in these inner regions of Tamilnadu as well ?I saw tanks overflowing with water and huge puddles every where. At dawn as we hurtled towards Thirunelvelli , 4 hours away I saw a lone bird bobbing and ducking into a pond sending out ripples of water in ever increasing circles.A very soothing sight ,that eased my claustrophobia.

The station was pleasantly neat and tidy,unlike the one at Egmore where I had boarded the train .In fact all the railway stations in smaller towns in TN are clean with spanking new stainless steel chairs and highly polished granite benches. The one's at Chennai are over crowded and smelly and look decrepit and run down .

I was under the impression that Thirunelvelli would be a small town . I was wrong.It is a sprawling urban area . There are houses and houses every where.Up to 15 kms away from the city , there are innumerable pockets of middle class neighbourhoods.

We tore down the Vajpayee's golden quadrilateral roads on the Kashmir to Kanyakumari high ways smoothly and swiftly for several kilometres and cut in, to reach a neat village , the ancestral home of a leading corporate house of Tn. They have taken great pains to beautify, develop these areas and maintain all the temples , their staff and priests in and around very well.

That village was witness to ,2 historic events. The tossing of Ramanuja who is also known as Emberumanar,a Vedic scholar seeped with bhakthi [ devotion] towards Sriman Narayana [Vishnu],was the proponent of Visishtadwaita philosophy,who strove life long to bring back people who had deserted Hinduism in favour of non vedic religions to Hindu fold; in a stream , by the Brahmin' priests of neighbouring Kerala,that is just a few kms away, where he had gone to preach, after beating him soundly for daring to break strict caste rules as was prevalent 1000 years ago.They couldn't stomach Sri Ramnujars egalitarianism of welcoming all ,irrespective of caste and creed to the fold of Sri Vaishnavism.

A flight of steps downwards,near the stream leads us to the rock where he was dumped. He
slowly recovered and recuperated in these sylvan surroundings, in the shadows of Mahendra giri hills,amidst clumps of banana and coconut trees and paddy fields.

A km away is the place where Thirumangai Aazhwar , the chieftain, Vaishnavite saint poet of 9 th cent AD from Chozhanadu , shed his mortal remains.

It is another place where nature has coloured the canvas in rich colours.