Some highlights of our tour of the city of Chennai, which has a population of ten million:
We did a lot of walking around, just seeing how the people live. The festival of Navratri is going on, celebrating the goddess Durga, who is one of the consorts of Shiva. Today, people had their work tools blessed. The tuk-tuk (three-wheeled mini-cab) drivers decorated their vehicles with marigold garlands, plantain boughs, strands of rope and colored paste, and put lemons under the wheels to be crushed. Sudha and our driver, Vijay, had the same done with our bus, and a priest performed a blessing ceremony over the bus and us.
A family was having the hair of its three very young children shaved off with a straight razor, in order to sacrifice it to the god of a nearby temple. We walked through a noisy street-chaos--cars, trucks, buses, tuk-tuks, pedal-rickshaws, overloaded carts pulled by oxen or bare-footed men. People insisted on having their picture taken. One elderly pedicab driver posed sideways on his bike and fell off backwards, apparently unhurt (Sudha told us that he had apparently been drinking a little too much, in honor of the festival).
We took a wild tuk-tuk ride to the Basilica of St. Thomas. We have now been to all three of the churches claiming to be, as a sign there proudly boasted, the burial site of one of the twelve apostles of Jesus (St. Peter's in Rome, Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and St. Thomas in Chennai).
We are now at a fancy Radisson resort in Mahabalipuram, down the Bay of Bengal coast from Chennai.
We did a lot of walking around, just seeing how the people live. The festival of Navratri is going on, celebrating the goddess Durga, who is one of the consorts of Shiva. Today, people had their work tools blessed. The tuk-tuk (three-wheeled mini-cab) drivers decorated their vehicles with marigold garlands, plantain boughs, strands of rope and colored paste, and put lemons under the wheels to be crushed. Sudha and our driver, Vijay, had the same done with our bus, and a priest performed a blessing ceremony over the bus and us.
A family was having the hair of its three very young children shaved off with a straight razor, in order to sacrifice it to the god of a nearby temple. We walked through a noisy street-chaos--cars, trucks, buses, tuk-tuks, pedal-rickshaws, overloaded carts pulled by oxen or bare-footed men. People insisted on having their picture taken. One elderly pedicab driver posed sideways on his bike and fell off backwards, apparently unhurt (Sudha told us that he had apparently been drinking a little too much, in honor of the festival).
We took a wild tuk-tuk ride to the Basilica of St. Thomas. We have now been to all three of the churches claiming to be, as a sign there proudly boasted, the burial site of one of the twelve apostles of Jesus (St. Peter's in Rome, Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and St. Thomas in Chennai).
We are now at a fancy Radisson resort in Mahabalipuram, down the Bay of Bengal coast from Chennai.
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