Thursday, March 11, 2010

Steady progress during the last 10 days!!!

After the last post that I had made a couple of weeks back, things have been proceeding steadily without getting struck. Maybe it was Guru Rayar's thought that the lessons on patience has been taught enough to me for the time being!!!

After one of the architects and another engineer who was instrumental in shaping another of the mrithika brindavanams for Rayar in Chennai had given their acceptance to carry out the works, it was the turn of the sthapathi to come out with the initial sketches on the vimana, artha mandapa and maha mandapam. For this purpose, I had requested the sthapathi to come down to Sri rangam with all these details on the last Monday March 11,2010. After discussion with the acharyar and taking into account the various agama sastra rules, it was decided that it would not be appropriate to have a single sanctum sanctorum having all the deities of Sri Lakshmi Nrsimhar, Anjaneya, Rayar brindavanam, Pandurangar and Ramar all in a single enclosure. So it was decided that we will split this up in to separate sanctum sanctorums. After this discussion, I had requested Sthapathi to come up with the birds eye view of the temple complex for the architect to come up with the elevation view as well as the revised estimate. After this fruitful discussion lasting for more than an hour, my host in Srirangam took me to the Ranganathar temple as well as the Sri Raghavendra mutt there. Surprisingly, there was no crowd at all in the temple and we walked straight quickly to the main sanctum to have an excellent darshan!!! I took it as one of the positive indications coming in from HIM on the changes to the structure that was discussed a couple of hours back before our visit to the temple!!!

The initial sketches to the design are provided below:

The ‘maha mandapam’ enclosure with a flight of steps on the three sides leading to the artha mandapam and sanctum sanctorum will look as in the following URL:

http://gururayar.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/mahamandapamfront.jpg

The artha mandapam and the main vimanam would like as in the following URL. The left hand side part of this scanned picture gives a side view of the sanctum sanctorum and the ‘artha mandapam’. The right hand side of the scanned picture shows the front view of the gaja prashta vimanam that is the planned vimanam for the main sannidhi.

http://gururayar.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/sideandfrontviewofsanctum.jpg