Temple for the Techies ;-)

It’s yet another pilgrimage for me in this month, again in to the state of Andhra pradesh. Two weeks back I was on a trip to Tirupathi and now to Hyderabad, infact chilkur to be more precise and exact about the location. This temple is very famous for the people travelling abroad especially to US. It’s also called as the VISA temple. For me it was really new, something different and amusing to hear that from one of my friends who wanted to visit this temple. The Balaji temple in Chilkur is being visited by thousands and thousands of people every week, majorly by the IT folks and other students who await their visa approval to travel to US.

This temple is located in a village called Chilkur which is around 30 KMs from the Hyderabad city. The connectivity to the temple is really good as there are a lot of buses leaving from Mehdipatnam to Chilkur every 20 mins. [One of the buses which I remember was 288D, as we travelled in a taxi to the temple I didn’t notice much about the other bus routes.] From Mehdipatnam, Chilkur is about 16KMs and it follows the scenic route via the Mrugavani National park. This temple here is entirely different from all the other ones I have seen primarily for the fact that there are no monetary donations accepted. There is no hundi present inside the temple where you can donate any money.

Here goes the belief followed in the temple. One has to make a wish of his/hers and make pradikshana (circumambulate) 11 times. Once the wish is fulfilled he/she should go back to the temple and do pradikshana for 108 times. People of all ages and origin come to this temple, make their own wish and revisit once fulfilled. The Lord Balaji here in the temple is considered so powerful that almost everybody’s wishes get fulfilled and especially for those VISA seekers, they have always seen success after the visit to the temple and hence made this a VISA temple :). There are no special Pooja or anything done for anybody. All we can do is just see the God, pray and wish for ourselves and do the pradikshana. The timings of the temple are from 06:00 AM to 08:00 PM. Twice in a day Pooja would be done by 07:00 AM and 07:00 PM. Rest of all the time it is open for public.

We reached the temple by around 11:00 AM. There are a lot of shops and hotels in that area, where we can have food. We had our breakfast in an Udupi hotel and proceeded to the temple. Since it was a Sunday there was a big crowd of people waiting in the queue, but the queue did move really fast and we were done with our darshan by around 12:00 PM. We had to wait for about half an hour to start with the pradikshana; it took around another half an hour to complete the 11 rounds. That’s it; we are done, went again for a quick darshan and came out of the temple. It would take close to 4 hours for anyone to complete the 108 rounds. Once out of the temple, we had some really awesome lemon soda, sugar cane juice in the nearby shops and headed back to the city :)

Looking forward and awaiting my second chance, yet that won’t be covered in the blog later ;-)