Attending a religious ceremony is a common thing to people based out to the southern part of India, especially in Kerala. Most fortunately, after many months, yesterday I got to attend one such custom. The place was a temple devoted to “Bhagavathy”  which refers to female goddess in Hindu tradition, in a place called Kallikadu, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. The entire function was referred to me as “KALANKAVU” (Well, I still couldn’t dissect the word’s meaning. )

It was a good 2 hour drive from my home and the way throughout was like driving inside a forest with dense lush greens both sides of the road. It was a good feeling to be with your family devoid of all tensions from office and work, to spend some quality personal time with our dears and nears. The temple was rather a small one when compared to the usual majestic natured keralite style and heritage of temples. It had a main “garbhagraha” (core place) with the main diety “Bhagavathy” inside and a few other “pratista”s’ too, some of them I was not able to recognize despite my knowledge with the Hindu mythology.

The one thing which attracted my eyes was a huge gold plated crown with a lot of snakes carved in it. (May be i liked it because of my attraction towards snakes). I could also find loads of flowers being kept in one side of the temple. There were many varieties of it. Overall it was a colorful sight. The most important sight was a team of people performing “Chenda Melam”. Truly they were doing wonders with their hands. Being a so called “Mallu” I had attended a lot of such chenda melam but this was the best. Young chaps not more than 25 years were performing at their maximum level. By maximum, I mean maximum.

The main event started by late evening 7:30 pm IST when a particular man dressed as “Bhagavathy” was decorated with gold chest plate and a golden foot trinklet (Chilanka – in malayalam) started walking around the temple with a few more people accompanying. The main attraction to me was he was also wearing the crown which I mentioned earlier. From the looks, I could clearly say that the crown was massive in weight and size. I was expecting the guy to carry it around for 2 or 3 rounds and the function is to end, but there I was mistaken.

Slowly the pace increased after 4th or 5th round. By pace, I meant the pace of the person walking slowly started dancing , the chenda melam’s pace and the pace in which our hearts started beating looking at something unexpected. After some, one solid hour of rotating the temple, dancing and walking in steps synchronizing the rhythm of the melam, this guys started acting fanatic and as per the people told me, it is believed that the deity herself had come into him. I could easily believe this as I have already gone through these strings before.

It was already 9 and still the ritual was on level 10. What an energy around. I was welcoming more and more energy consciously into me from the universe and there were abundance of it available. I could clearly visualize the state of the person who has become the deity herself. This, we psychology people normally call as “selective dual personality”. A common site in most of religious places nowadays. It’s a place where a weak minded person, being surrounded by people who believe that this man is going to turn to someone else, pushed to his limits by the performance and supported by high volume of rhythmic music which acts as a channel to take him to the state of sensuous thinking and adopting to the person who he wants to be. And it’s a proved fact that these people draw enormous amount of energy from the universe in this process and once the process is done successfully, that is the focus of the person kept clear and clean and concentrated to that point alone, then the mental shift occurs. He starts projecting the image of the person he becomes. The power in him increases and he attains the state of the “Sixth Sense”. Well, that’s a more deeper context and I don’t wish to move out of the theme.

All I was amazed was the energy of the Chenda Melam people. They were continuously playing for more than 4 hours. As the circling continued, the flowers were thrown on air to the deity and the whole place became colorful all of a sudden. I could only shoot a small bit of it as there were a lot of water splattered on air and I was at the risk of my mobile getting wet.  End of the 3 hour function, the guy came to his real self when he experienced the pain and tiredness of his physical self and fell down unconscious.

Overall it was a visual, olfactory and kinesthetic treat of us and being experienced this with the family together also increased the rapport with them a step higher. Belief and practicality and all such terms push aside, i would request people to witness and participate in such customs where you unite and drive the energy in air to your inner self.