Continuation - Tirunelveli Trip

Vanakkam Nanbargalay...

This is in continuation to my earlier post about my tirunelveli trip.

The hotel we stayed was so comfortable and decent. We took an autorickshaw from tirunelveli junction to our hotel. We were royally ripped off by the auto rickshaw fellow saying that he has to take a bye pass road to reach the hotel due to some divertions etc., Being a new place (for all of us..) and also morning hours, without bargaining we hired the auto, but to our disappointment before we all could adjust our sitting, we reached the hotel. So this was the very first tirunelveli HALWA (bulb) we received early morning.. Actually the railway station was much in the visibility from the hotel we stayed..

Then we had our routines, freshed up ourselves and had a brief breakfast in the adjacent hotel. The filter coffee was too good and we all thoroughly enjoyed it. Then we hired a qualis (Air conditioned..!!) for our tirunelveli sight seeing and our vehicle geared up around 10.30 am. The driver was so friendly and we thoroughly enjoyed his company through out our travel.

We all played an instant small game among ourselves by trying to guess the driver name. Every one used their chance and said some names of their own. I used my (tiny) brain and guessed a name for our driver and in fact I was over confident that I will be the winner in this. Actually with great difficulty I read a name written in the glass behind our vehicle and thought that might be his name.. But unfortunately the name written on the glass was this driver's brother name. So none of us won in this game and in fact no one could even manage to guess the first letter of it..!! Strange name.. I am hearing it for the very first time.. Can any of you guess??. His name starts with the letter "V"..

Hence forth I shall term the driver as "Mr. V" through out this post. Mr. V was also kind enough to accompany (walking) with us to the tourist spots and shared all the info he has about those places. We learnt that several movies like Sami, Gilli, etc., were filmed in front of the kailasa nathar temple in nellai.. As if some historic spot, I immediately used my digicam to click all those divine(!!) filmed places..!!

While conversing Mr. V also found us to be good (surprising..!!) and shared about his personal to some extent. It seems the vehicle (Qualis) we hired, belongs to a famous tamil actor (he told us the name.. ) and in fact his (actor's) name was very well written "_____ CABS"..

Mr. V helped us by standing in the crowd to buy the famous halwa for us. To our surprise he did not even taste a little bit of it and said that because of regular eating of this halwa he developed a hatred towards it..!!

Then we entered in to the famous nellaippar temple. Once again great sculptures inside this mega temple. A person who pretend to be a guide in the temple showed us some pillars (made out of hard rock) and told us to bang those pillars with our hands.. Initially we were hesitant and was also not giving any importance to that person, but later out of his repeated request I just hit one of the pillars with my palm and then he asked us to keep our ears near the pillar.. My god.. amazing... we heard the sounds of different instruments like Veena,Violin, Jaltarang, flute from each of the pillars.. Then each of us took our turns and then tried to validate whether what we hear was true.. IT was TRUE.. What a design and construction during the olden days with out any qualified architect, hi-fi softwares like autocad or archicad.. How was that possible.. Still this question revolves around me.. Great India..

While exiting this huge nellaippar temple all of us were totally drained of our energy. After some time we reached our hotel and the very next day morning was our train from tirunelveli to Trichy.. Again to our surprise Mr. V told us to be ready in the morning, so that we can be dropped in the tirunelveli railway station. As promised Mr. V turned up exactly to pick us and while going to the railway station he shared with us his marriage photo where in the actor (owner of this qualis vehicle) was present. Mr. V was too good (ROMBA Nallavar...) enough to be so friendly, he did not charge us for the station drop.. Free of cost trip from hotel to railway station.. I felt it as some compensation for the first day rip off by the auto rickshaw. But to show our humanity, we gave an amount to Mr. V as a token of our love, but he was so adamant to take that and some how finally we convinced him to take. I experienced two extreme of people in span of two days.. one person ripped off (autorickshaw).. one person was so generous (Mr. V)

Whole of our tirunelveli trip Mr. V was our hero and he was so kind enough to make a phone call to us the next day to ensure whether we reached trichy safely.

One more interesting information to share. While our sight seeing trip, Mr. V showed us a statue of famous old Nadhaswara musician 'Karaikurichi Arunachalam'. While hearing and seeing this statue my father expressed his liking towards the music of Karaikurichi Arunachalam and also said several good things about him. Mr. V was silently listening to all of this and later when we reached trichy Mr. V called my dad and said that he has bought 2 audio cassettes of Karaikurichi Arunachalam which will be posted to our house address. My father was so much moved by this gesture of Mr. V.

Seeing the gesture of Mr. V, I instantly remembered the tamil verses..... "Nallaar oruvar ularel, avar poruttu ellarukum peiyum Mazhai"...

Our train was at 7.50 AM to trichy and we all boarded in our compartment very fresh being a fresh morning..

To be continued......

--- Vartaa....