Visit to Tiruvannamalai in 2025

After about 8.5 years, I visited Tiruvannamalai again during my visit to Chennai in 2025. The last time I visited was in January 2017 - in fact I did my first Vipassana session in Dhamma Arunachala. I have a lot of fond memories of this place and I enjoyed my time at both Ramanasramam and the Arunachaleshwarar temple after the meditation session.

This year's visit is a little more special. I got to visit my music guru, Sri. Sriram Parthasarathy in person and learnt in person from him. He and his wife, Sruthi akka are one of the most genuine and wonderful folks I've ever seen. The amount of love and affection they share for everyone around them is truly something to strive for.

We did visit Ramansramam during this visit and enjoyed the darshan and meditated for a while. We were also fortunate to see a male peacock perched up a tree with its beautiful plumage even in the midst of construction and painting work. Also managed to grab a couple of books to peruse later.

We also visited the Arunalachaleshwarar temple and the gripe around this experience is what prompted this post. I remember my 2017 visit to have been rather pleasant but this time it was something that was far removed from it. Lately, Tiruvannamalai has been around some controversy around influx of devotees from other parts of India, more notably from the Telugu states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The rumor is that apparently it was circulated in a YouTube channel/WhatsApp that Arunachaleshwarar is the guardian god for all the Telugu people around the time of COVID and that has spiked a lot of traffic from these folks. There have also been a lot of controversies around land/property being bought by folks outside Tamil Nadu and boards and signage not displaying in Tamil.

I don't want to highlight these as problems - the root of the problem is the lack of infrastructure around the temple. For instance, pretty much every route to get near the gopurams were cordoned off for cars. We tried taking a few diversions to find a better spot but at the end, just parked outside and asked someone who pointed us that we could only take an auto to get to the temple and back. This definitely smells like the auto drivers and government/police being in cahoots to unnecessarily fleece devotees. For folks who have the means, this is not a big deal but many others are resorted to walk almost 2-3 kms just to get closer to the Gopuram.

The second issue is there are no clear paths for exit in the temple. The recommended exit pattern when you enter through one of the gopurams is to exit through another gopuram that is to the west of it. This is again a total sham. How does the government expect you to remove your slippers in one gate and then exit through another gate and walk back to the original entrance? We ended up just backtracking our path and several times had to take the same narrow, cordoned-off path as folks who are coming into the temple.

Once we were near the main deity, all they said is "move move" and we hardly had a minute to catch a glimpse of the deity. For a temple that was once very accessible, this seems to be completely bonkers.

In the video I linked, there's a gentleman who talks around 10:08 who very clearly articulates the problem here. It's not the influx of people - it's at the end of the day, people from other countries. It's purely the lack of infrastructure and planning. There are many places in India that have a higher influx of devotees round the year and there is better infrastructure for devotees. This influx is definitely translating into more revenue to the State HRCE but there's no evidence that this revenue is being reinvested into planning better facilities for devotees.

Honestly, this is what I told my parents after this experience - going to temples is supposed to bring you calm and tranquil. It's far from it these days - I've visited Tirupathi a grand total of 1 time for this very same reason. I didn't anticipate Tiruvannamalai to get to this state, being one of my most favorite temples. My personal philosophy to visit temples is to just be in silence, observing oneself, questioning it for any ego, revel in the beauty of the architecture and just show your gratitude for all the good things life and chance has given you. The form of a deity personifies that for me - someone who can be attributed for random patterns in the vast canvas of entropy that seemingly benefit or not-benefit us. But with these kinds of experiences, the whole quietude of being in a temple is lost.