Like all Sundays, had planned yesterday to maximise effectiveness. Had decided to do nothing, but play squash, go to a cousin's for dinner and also visit a temple on the way.
Left home in the evening after a good hour and a half of squash and a cuppa chai with Akshay. Moved through the lazy Sunday evening traffic in Mumbai (including a traffic jam by a truck stuck on an incline!) to reach SiddhiVinayak temple sometime late in the evening.
Got into quite a queue. The system at the temple is that they let in about 150-200 people every few minutes into the sanctum sanctorum of the temple. This keeping the queue moving forward in batches. The aarti (prayer services) are held probably twice or thrice a day. Quite a nice surprise when I got into the batch that would be a part of the aarti. Take it a bit forward - there are about a 100 odd people who are a part of each aarti and hence being right in front of the diety during the aarti is still more improbable.
Now that I am writing this article, one can easily guess where I would be standing during the aarti. It was a very nice and soothing experience. The aura through a the drums beating, chants of the pandits, the singing along and clapping of the devotees and most importantly the amount of devotion in the air was an experience one doesn't go through very often.
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