It had been a long awaited dream of my wife to go to Kanchipuram after our marraige and finally we executed our plans last weekend.

We started on Saturday early morning, a little after 6am from HAL, Bangalore. It took us 7am to hit NH7, due to some confusion in the route. The highway was really great and we reached Kanchipuram by 11am after crossing 3-4 toll-gates and taking a break for around 45min for breakfast. The best part, there was not even a single speed-breaker except for the toll-gates and we just ripped through. Only trouble was, we didn’t find any decent restaurant for a long time and picked up something from the road-side, not expecting to find anything later on.  But, to our surprise, a few restaurants started appearing after we crossed a total of over 100 km.

As it was a weekend, there was quite some crowd in Kanchipuram and we had a lot of traffic to deal with in the town. We had planned for Abhishekam at Kanchi Amman Temple around 4:30pm that day and it went off well. After that, we went to Sarvana Bhavan Restaurant, which my wife keeps claiming to be the best ever South Indian restaurant in India. And it surely lived up to those tall expectations. We just got so hooked to this place that, all the three meals on the next day were at Sarvana Bhavan, with the afternoon special south indian meals being the best of its kind. Saturday evening was dedicated to shopping of silk sarees. As expected, our women folk didn’t finalize on anything after making that guy pull out at least a 100 sarees.

On Sunday morning, we went to one of the many nadi jyothisham astrologers, which was my only interest to go to Kanchipuram. We searched for over half-an-hour to find the place and though it looked very skeptical, we went ahead purely on my insistence.  The nadi astrologer first took my thumb print and got some matching palm leaves. Immediately after that, he asked me the day-of-the-week I was born. Obviously, I was not aware and had to tell my complete DOB so that he can find out in the computer. This really gave away a lot  and my father-in-law, who was always insisting that I don’t give any birth details was disappointed. After that, he kept asking me questions like starting-ending letters of my father’s-name/mother’s-name/wife’s name/my-name/number-of-siblings/number-of-children/girl-boy child etc. This went on for almost an hour untill he found a plam leaf which supposedly matched the best with my description.  Based on the matched palm leaf, I got my predictions recorded in a CD within the next 10-15 min.  The fact that, these predictions overlapped with 90% of my predictions done based on my birth-chart in my hometome is either a miraculous coincidence or a complete deceit by the nadi-astrologer. My father-in-laws suspicion was, if  the astrologer knows my birth date, there is no need of all those palm leaves, as he can get my predictions only based on birth date using any of the available software on the internet.

As our Saturday shopping didn’t lead to buying anything, we again went back to it on Sunday afternoon. After shopping for another 2-3 hours, we finally came back to our hotel and had a good rest. In the evening, we went to Vishnu-Kanchi, which is about 5 km away. Here, there was an amazing temple and was very peaceful too. After that, we bid adieu to our in-laws at the bus-station and got back to Sarvana Bhavan for our last meal of the trip.  Our return drive to Bangalore started on early Sunday morning around 7am and we reached home by around 12pm with a short break in-between for a quick snack.

Route: Innovative Multiplex on Outer Ring Road – Left Towards Sarjapur – Take right after 10 Km – Dead End take right – At the Circle, take right towards athibele – Dead End (Flyover construction) take left on to NH7 – At Krishnagiri, go on the first flyover and go under the second flyover towards left connecting to NH4 – Keep going straight on NH4 which lead to SH – You hit a deviation towards right to Kanchipuram, which is 70km before Chennai – Take that to reach the destination

• Hitch Hiker’s Guide to Galaxy, Douglas Adams
• Catch-22, Joseph Heller
• The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins
• The Dilbert Principle, Scott Adams