Monday 10 December, 2007

Shri Pathala Pratyankara Devi Temple, Morattandi, Puducherry (Pondicherry)

For quite sometime my wife has been telling me that she wanted to visit the Prathyankara Devi Temple near Pondicherry. So we finally made plans to visit it on Amavasya (New Moon) day on 9th December 2007. We were five of us and since my esteem could take only 4 plus my driver we decided to hire a Chevorlet Tavera. The Sumo was not a choice because of our rather rough experience when we took on the road to visit the Narasimha Kshetrams, I however would have preferred a Scorpio but the travel guy didnt have one.

So we started at 5am that day picked up the others at Vadapalani and headed towards Dindivanam by 5:45 am. We didnt use the ECR because we needed a vehicle permit to enter Pndy and to obtain a permit we needed to approach the Check Post at Pondy from Dindivanam side. The four laned GST Road took us about an hour and half (we did 120 kmph) to reach Dindivanam we took the left and headed towards Pondy.

About 15 minutes later we stopped by the Panchamukhi Anjenaya Temple to have Darshan. We saw the amazing floating stone used by the Vanara Sena while building the bridge to Lanka, kept in a brass vessel and is supposed to have been brought in from Rameshwaram. We had Prasadam (Chakkra Pongal) and then set out for Morattandi.

We asked for directions and nobody seemed to be aware of Pratyankara Devi Temple, Pathala Kali Temple evoked some responses. The Morattandi temple is about 3 kms from JIPMER so if you are take the ECR road reach JIPMER and ask for directions.

The Prathyankara Devi temple is located in middle of five graveyards, though I doubt even a single one exists today because I tried hard to spot any remains and didn't see any.

No comments: