Journey to Ramanasramam: Getting There from Mysore

First in a four part account of a trip to Ramanasramam, making my way across South India from the Tibetan settlement of Bylakuppe two hours west of Mysore in the state of Karnataka, to the city of Chennai on the east coast of Tamil Nadu before heading down the next day to the pilgrimage town of Tiruvannamalai.

On the road, back on the tracks. A cross country swing west to east. First from Bylakuppe Tibetan settlement to Mysore by car with my brother in law Sonam Tashi, then the Shatabdi Express train from Mysore to Chennai with one stop in Bangalore along the way, all in all a 10 hour ride. Mysore to Bangalore, done that part of the journey so many times before it doesn’t bear thinking about and the leg to Chennai I have done quite a few times as well. All back in the days when we used to fly from London to Chennai because there hadn’t been a direct flight to Bangalore, something which got rectified around 2004.

This time seemed better as the train was pretty new which meant it was actually possible to see through the windows and get a good view of the country, the plains country of southern Karnataka, followed by the plains country of northern Tamil Nadu. Nothing too much to write home about in terms of sights seen if truth be told, but quietly fascinating nonetheless. Rolling through the places out east along the way from the sandalwood city of Mysore to the garden city of Bangalore went something like this – Mandya, sugar town; Maddur, spice town; Channapatna, city of toys; Ramanagara, silk city. Stared out the window most of the time as the land passed on by and gradually faded into sunset, then when there was nothing more to see I sat there and read a book.

Train was full after Bangalore, packed to the rafters. An Indian couple sat in the seats behind me were relentlessly speaking English with their children, educating them mercilessly for the whole damn ride. Education, education, education; that was the name of the game, the only show in town as far as they were concerned, no dust bowl gazin’ for them that was for sure. It dawned on me that I would have absolutely nuthin’ to say to them if they spoke to me. They were neither good nor bad, just living out their destinies right on the button, pushing on all the way to the top if they could, for them and their children and for generations to come. Now, when was it exactly I fell off that particular tree?

Arrived in Chennai central around 9.30 pm. Once off the train I managed to avoid the porters and taxi touts who continually hung around the railway station pretty much any time of day or night, looking for business, hungry for business, the need to survive etched upon their faces. Managed to pick up a couple of curses as I walked out the station whilst staring straight in front of me with my rucksack on my back, but I knew the score, I knew the ropes. The thing to do was simply walk until you got to the auto rickshaw stands where the price for a ride would be at least half of what it would be if you went anywhere by car. My plan worked well and I picked up an auto rickshaw with no problem at all to take me to the hotel I’d booked, a place just round the corner in Triplicane called the Himalaya International. I’d chosen it from out of the slim travel book on Tamil Nadu that I was carrying. My first two choices, places I had stayed in before, New Woodlands in Mylapore and Hotel Ashoka in Egmore, were both fully booked, so now it was Triplicane and the Himalaya International this time around. It was Saturday night after all, and in Chennai business was good with plenty of people in town needing accommodation, so no wonder the others were full.

The Himalaya it was for me then and when I rolled up at reception after the 5 minute rickshaw ride I realized pretty quickly that Triplicane was the Muslim quarter and that the Himalaya was more like a Kashmir Himalaya rather than a Tibet Himalaya, which did make a bit of a difference, if you get my drift and my drift of course is that of a jumpy white man. The place was pretty dark and basic, but it was clean and functional so I had no complaints, even if the reception staff did demand money from me up front and with an attitude which allowed no compromise. There was no point in arguing however, I was in the wrong part of town for any of that, so I just had to take my medicine and cough up the bucks. By the time I had signed myself in and got all my gear up to my room it was well past 10 pm, way too late in the day to worry about whether or not I had made the right decision, I just had to get on with it, simple as that. Still, it didn’t come close to being the worst place I had stayed in India during my travels, not by a long way, that particular honour probably had to go to the exquisitely named Hotel Ahluwalia Palace in Karol Bagh, New Delhi, a rather frightening dump I had ended up in after a long trip back from Bhopal back in 2005 and where the rooms had no windows.

No food and drink were provided in the Himalaya, room service clearly being a step too far, so I made things secure as far as all my stuff was concerned and then got it together to go for a walk outside in order to pick up some juice and, with a bit of luck, a nice bunch of small bananas. There was plenty of traffic still on the road and initially it all felt a bit clumsy as I stumbled along the broken pavements in an unknown part of a vast Indian city which I had last visited nearly 10 years ago. Things had changed and it felt like I had lost some bounce as far as dealing with it was concerned, nevertheless bit by bit I got into my stride, even if I didn’t really bother to hang around too much longer than was necessary once I had found what I wanted. In times past I might well have used it as an opportunity to take a walk down unknown streets just for the hell of it, to see how far they took me into uncharted territory, but on this occasion the simple fact of the matter was that I wasn’t up for it and only wanted to head back to the Himalaya with my late evening purchases of fruit.

Back in my room and safely locked inside I got my meditation stool out from my rucksack and had a sitting session in the dark. Not for long, just enough to clear my mind a little, maybe 30 minutes, something like that. A quick 108 or 135, counting the in breaths, counting the out breaths, allowing me to concentrate on the layers of sound coming from the whirling ceiling fan above my head, enough for me to end up feeling pretty relaxed. Slept that night without a problem, fan was on all the time as it stayed hot throughout. In the early morning light I sat again in meditation, read a while, then had a shave and freshened myself up before venturing out for breakfast which came in the form of iddlys, sambhar and fresh coffee from a restaurant just along the way from the Himalaya. It was good, very good indeed and this for me was India in a nutshell, always able to conjure up something deliciously unexpected from seemingly out of nowhere.

After checking out of the Himalaya I took an auto rick to New Woodlands Hotel in Mylapore where over the phone I had made arrangements with their travel desk to take a car from Chennai down to Tiruvannamalai at an agreed price of around 3500 to 4000 rupees. Bit of an indulgence because the bus would have been infinitely cheaper but I was in a hurry, time was not really on my side and even though it would have been peanuts, the bus would have taken twice as long. When I’d informed the reception in Woodlands of my arrival, they called the travel desk where after a little while a middle aged Hindu lady by the name of Mrs Panda came up to go over the details of my booking and take some money for the ride. It was duly arranged for my car to be ready by 11 am which gave me a bit of time to kill by way of hanging round the reception at Woodlands and jotting down a few notes, something which I was in the habit of doing from time to time when there was fuck all else for me to get on with.

Now here I am in the reception of Woodlands in Mylapore writing this, watching the morning shadows on the wall, reflections in the Indian sunlight, with the other people sitting in the hotel front area. Waiting for my driver, all arrangements successfully made with Mrs Panda from the travel desk, happy to sit, fly on the wall, safe in the knowledge I am heading down to the ashram. Years gone by and no doubt the fires of expectation would have propelled me forward, my mind caught up in the swirl of imagined possibilities. I used to believe a change in physical circumstance, physical environment, would lead to a change in my mind as well. Brought into the illusion that the external world would somehow be powerful enough to forge within me a new way of being, new way of seeing, like some kind of rebirth. Now I see it can never be, it doesn’t really touch the fundamentals, even if on the surface things might appear to change. If we don’t realize what lies inside then to hope that climbing the world’s highest mountain or diving down into the world’s deepest ocean is somehow going to provide a new identity is only going to lead to disappointment. Better to stick to what lies within, walk through those walls of invisibility in the mind, practice slipping into that second skin…

It was a day on the road down to Tiruvannamalai, ending up in a comfortable room at the Hotel Ramakrishna on the other the side of town to where the ashram was. Finally left Woodlands at noon or just gone, after having waited around the reception area of the hotel for an hour or so longer than what I was supposed to until a car was available. During what turned out to be a 3 to 4 hour journey there was not much in the way of words exchanged between me and the driver. That was just how I wanted it as there was nothing worse than useless chat, well in fact there was and that was a driver who would have insisted on dragging me to some dump of a tourist showroom along the way, all in the vain hope I would be dumb enough to buy some piece of junk and thus earn him a little bit of commission from the showroom owner. Common enough when on the road in India, paying out the bucks to others to take you here and there by way of places you didn’t want to go, but thankfully not this time around, and I was happy for it, very happy indeed.

This meant I was able to sit in the back seat of the car and let the scenes pass me by within the early afternoon heat haze of a Tamil Nadu fast approaching the hot season. The crawl out of the southern reaches of Chennai made me realise the city was now bigger than it had ever been and that it was most certainly set to get even bigger still, all the way down the coast it seemed, with land developers ready to take it as far as they could go. An insatiable appetite for growth, ever expanding urban sprawl, mind boggling numbers of people, all ensured it was more than a little bit of a relief to finally reach the open road, where we were then able to drive as if in a mad race against time. The open road was National Highway 45 which would have taken us all the way down to Tiruchirappalli in the centre of the state and then onto the ancient temple city of Madurai which lay beyond.

At a certain point we made a right turn off the highway and not long after that we stopped for snacks at a roadside tea bar where a red eyed, dark skinned local woman came up to me and asked me where I was from. From her eyes it looked like she might have had a drink or two, or maybe it was something medical which had turned them bloody, I just don’t know. Told her I was from London and then she turned away with nothing more to say. In my surprise I realized I had fallen for it again, assumed she actually knew more than a few basic words of English, that she might have been able to engage me in a long and profound conversation about what I thought of Tamil Nadu and stuff like that, when the reality was she could obviously do no such thing. Suitably replenished we were back on the road and by 3.30 in the afternoon we had reached Tiruvannamalai, in which we were able to locate without too much of a problem the Hotel Ramakrishna, the place where I was to stay the night.

Since my driver was one of the best I’d had in India, in that he just did what he was supposed to do and nothing more, no funny stuff, I gave him a 250 rupees tip which was very generous and which he was more than happy to accept, but that was OK because as far as I was concerned it was a job well done. So now I was in Tiruvannamalai which lay at the foot of the holy hill Arunachala, believed to be Siva incarnate, and it was a place which on and off I had been trying to imagine in my mind for the last few months after having had the urge to visit, which had kind of sprung up out of the blue, but what could I do to stop it? As usual with these things the reality was always so much different in terms of appearance to what my mind had come up with.

My plan was to stay at Hotel Ramakrishna for just one night and then head on down to the Ramana Maharshi ashram the next day to begin my stay there, as per the booking arrangements I had made with them. I took a walk through town and down to the ashram in the late afternoon, just as the brightness of the day was having the edge taken off it, to be replaced by a golden reddish glow mixed with some of the usual Indian urban pollution thrown in just for good measure. Full name of the ashram was Ramanasramam, the ashram of the spiritual master Ramana Maharshi who was born in a village relatively close to the ancient temple city of Madurai further on down south, and who had lived in Tiruvannamalai for 54 years from 1896 until 1950.

For the last six months or so I had been reading almost continually my copy of Talks With Ramana Maharshi, a book which I had reclaimed from Leigh Wyman, my work colleague at Wisdom Books, the small book distribution company based in East London which I helped run, was co-director of and also had shares in. I had lent my copy of Talks With Ramana Maharshi to Leigh’s father John Wyman a couple of years ago and if truth be told I had forgotten all about it, simply because at the time it was one of many spiritual books I was buying, without ever getting to sit down and actually give it a read. This might well have been the end of the story but, when in the middle of last year John Wyman died, I helped Leigh clear out his father’s bedroom in his bungalow in east London, the place where he had lived for the best part of the last 50 years. There was a bookshelf above his bed and right in the middle of the books he kept on that shelf was my copy of Talks With Ramana Maharshi. As soon as I saw it I felt an extremely strong urge to take it and so that is what I did, telling Leigh that it was one of mine which I had lent to his father and that I would now like to have it back, to which he replied that wouldn’t be a problem. Since then I had been reading it almost non-stop and I guess the impetus for getting so heavily into it was because a few weeks before that I’d read a book called Advaitic Sadhana by a man called S.S. Cohen who had been a disciple of Ramana Maharshi, living at Ramanasramam from the mid 1930’s until the end of his life. It is an incredibly powerful book in places, especially when it describes what meditation is all about, and it made me realise that if S.S. Cohen could write with such force and conviction, then what did that say about his teacher Ramana Maharshi?

From that point on I began to think about Ramana Maharshi again and therefore when I saw my copy of Talks on the bookshelf of the late John Wyman it was a no brainer that I would have it. A few months ago when my wife Khangla Metok and I had booked our tickets to go out to India for what had become our annual visit to the settlement of Bylakuppe in the south Indian state of Karnataka to celebrate Losar, the Tibetan New Year, I emailed Ramanasramam requesting a room in which to stay for 5 days. The ashram soon replied confirming my room reservation, something which I was very happy about, as I knew it was a popular place for devotees of Ramana Maharshi from all over the world to go and visit, with people staying there for anything up to a month or more. Guess the fact I emailed three months before I was actually due to go there ensured that I had done it in good time, not left it too late, thus avoiding disappointment, the boo hoo of not being able to stay.

As I walked through Tiruvannamalai on my way to the ashram, which was located at the other end of town to Hotel Ramakrishna, I had that pleasant feeling of knowing I had arrived in a place which, by the end of my stay there, I would no doubt see in a very different way to how I was seeing it then. It was a feeling which as I got older happened less and less often but even so, when its unexplainable magic did come along it was something to savour. In the middle of Tiruvannamalai was the great Hindu place of pilgrimage in the form of the Arunachaleshwar Temple, believed to be the largest one in the world dedicated to Lord Siva. It was big, thunderously so and it reminded me of an ancient medieval fortress which could shelter thousands of people if the need ever arose. Beyond the temple in the town centre, I navigated my way through the busy streets down to the Ramana Maharshi ashram on the Tiruvannamalai Road, where soon I knew that I was in the right place due to the sudden appearance, as if from out of the blue, of lots and lots of Westerners.

The ashram office was still open when I walked in through the ashram gates and I went there to check with them that they had indeed got my booking, despite the fact I had received a confirmation reply when I’d emailed them a few months ago. Just the way my mind worked I guess, I needed to get the reassurance that all was well for when I arrived the following morning to begin my stay there. It made all the difference, but rather than just simply letting go, having a little more trust in how the universe worked, which might have been the wiser option, it was not one I was really ever prepared to seriously contemplate. In other words I was prepared to make myself look stupid.

Now that I was in the ashram, I also couldn’t resist the chance to take a quick walk around and drink in the atmosphere which as a resident I would soon enough be partaking of. This included a visit to the meditation hall, the place where Ramana Maharshi had sat on a couch and made himself available to a constant stream of spiritual seekers who came to him from all over the world. They went to simply sit in his presence, to close their eyes and bathe in the light of his spiritual power, to get answers to their questions, answers which invariably came in the form of silence. When I stepped inside the meditation hall was full of people meditating, contemplating, reflecting; things which were pretty much exactly what I was hoping to do over the next five days.

It was with a nice feeling of expectation that I walked back through town to the Hotel Ramakrishna. After a cold shower to wash away the heat and the dust of the streets which lay in the heart of Tiruvannamalai, I went down to the restaurant and ate a really rather delicious masala dosa along with drinking a couple of fresh fruit juices followed by a bowl of mango ice cream for dessert. All very tasty, very tasty indeed! Don’t really know what happened after that because when I got back to my room to read my Ramana Maharshi book for a little while, it was as much as I could do to keep my eyes open, even though it was only 9.30 in the evening. Must have been all the food I had eaten, along with the travelling down from Chennai, and there was nothing else I could do but go to sleep, not even listen to any music on my ipod. It could also have been my long walk through town, going down to the ashram and back had taken 2 to 3 hours and I guess it had took more out of me than I’d thought.

As I lay there in the dark, multiple impressions of this new found and rather intense pilgrimage place deep down in South India crowded in on my mind; ever changing visions full of colour, full of life, full of those multi-faceted Hindu gods and goddesses carved into the walls and towers of the temples. It was no real surprise to me that when I briefly woke up in the middle of the night from a very deep sleep I was left wondering just exactly where I was. Oh yeah, oh yeah, Hotel Ramakrishna in Tiruvannamalai!