WORK, WORSHIP AND TRUSTING GOD

A week before, I visited Srisailam, a five-hour journey on the road. Early in the morning, I hit the rain-washed highway and raced along as the tyres hissing softly on the well-maintained road.

Srisailam Temple town surrounded by the Nallamala Hills and dense forests is also where the river Krishna flows through a deep narrow valley across which the Srisailam Dam was constructed creating a water reservoir of 600 square kilometers.

Once I reached the temple town, a short stroll down the street I noticed two essential facilities: first, several hutments of stores selling the snack foods, soaps, and shampoo and other exigencies of the overnight travelers, and the other was the orderly makeshift tenements catering tea and breakfast for early morning temple bound devotees. 

Surprisingly, each kiosk came to be a thriving, hardworking family enterprise: serving, brewing, cleaning, and inviting the customers in the most genial way. I was delighted to witness a profitable symbiosis, mutual dependability, an excellent imitable model of a labor of love.

One appreciable ambiance that I felt proud about the temple town, one aesthetically enjoyable aspect besides thousands of devotees thronging the temple for heavenly bliss, is how the authorities and management got into action and a task high on its agenda, day in and day out – the cleanliness, hygiene, and sanitization. The shop keepers, the vendors, the caretakers of the temple, and the masses of visitors and everyone seems conscious of the fact how cleanliness and godliness are staying closely in this place and seemed thrilled, including me, with a new religious experience in a healthy environment.