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Faith ‘halts’ nature in its tracks
Vedaranyam (Tamil Nadu), Dec. 31: Faith won over nature on Sunday when a special puja conducted after 50 years is said to have helped save Vedaranyam town, 48 km from Nagapattinam, from the tsunamis.
At least five nearby fishing hamlets, including Arcot Thurai, were devastated that morning but not this town, once notorious as a point for smuggling by LTTE sympathisers to the rebels in northern Sri Lanka, which is 30 nautical miles from here.
“Around 8.30 am on December 26, we first got to hear about the tsunami attack in other coastal parts of the state. After the first tsunami hit the Vedaranyam coast around 9 am, people flocked to the temple,” said Thyagarajan Gnanaguru, the executive officer of Sri Vedaraneeshwarar Swami temple built by the Chola dynasty.
The first giant wave had almost wiped away the nearby hamlets and killed two persons in the town itself, which is the southern-most tip of the worst-hit Nagapattinam district, according to Gnanaguru.
Immediately, the temple priests, including Sundaramurthy Kurukkal, Sivaraja Kurukkal and Kalyanasundara Iyer, revived an age-old practice of offering “special puja” to the shrine of Goddess Durga. The deity’s idol is believed to have been installed by Lord Ram on his way to Sri Lanka to retrieve his wife Sita. The shrine faces south, towards Sri Lanka.
Gnanaguru said that after the puja, the priests carried in a procession the “pottu karai (a piece of gold from the goddess’ taali or mangalsutra), a flower garland that adorned the deity, parivattam (silk cloth that draped the deity), sacred ash, vermilion and sandal paste and immersed everything at the shore directly facing the temple’s entrance.
The first tsunami had forced the sea to advance about 750 metres inside up to the railway gate, the temple officer said. But after the “special puja” and the immersion, “the sea did not advance further into the town and no casualties were reported here after that” during the second tsunami strike around 11 am, Gnanaguru said.
Namasivayam, who sells coconuts outside the temple, said Durga was last invoked to stave off a major catastrophe way back in 1955, when the town was threatened with a similar deluge.
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So the Christian God just saved one church, while Durga saved a whole town, and not once but twice!!!!!!
But I suppose you will tell me the church story is a real miracle but not the Durga one.