True Tales that are Stranger than Fiction!!

When I sort of hung my boots and left active work life in May 2011, I was pretty sure that I would have immense time to pursue my new found hobby as a blogger. Each day, I used to have a conversation in my own mind that tomorrow would be a better day to sit down and seriously make an attempt at writing. The justifications my mind presented were so convincing that I kept patronizing and never got down to writing.

The family’s visit to the temple town of Lord Venkateshwara at Tirumala in July’12 made me quickly pen a few paragraphs. This post received good feedback from friends and acquaintances and I was hopeful that the Lord had finally given me the much needed push. Well, to cut a long story short, it was just that I had indeed been procrastinating pretty well; the divine intervention had nothing to do with my laziness factor!!

But surprisingly, it was a pilgrimage trip to Sringeri Sharadamba’s abode in Oct’12 that did the trick. Although a faint memory, now that we have moved three months into the future, what stands out is the connection between this trip of ours and the previous one undertaken some fifteen years back. It must have been 1995 or 96, when we decided to travel by our first car – a navy blue Maruthi 800. Just as we were entering the outskirts of Kunigal town on Bangalore – Hassan highway, my younger son pointed the dashboard meter showing the engine temperature. It took me a couple of seconds to comprehend what was odd in the meter reading! In unison, both my sons said that the pointer was standing steady at ‘H’ and not the usual midway between ‘C’ & ‘H’!! It was a deserted highway with no possibility of help if the engine were to cease – that it hadn’t was in itself a miracle. We decided to take a chance and keep driving till we could find some help. We were lucky to hit a petrol bunk which had service/washing facilities. The attendant/mechanic first cooled the engine down in a phased manner and then made an attempt to check what could have gone wrong. We found absolutely nothing wrong…but not wanting to push our luck further, and much to the disappointment of the family, it was decided that we should head home.

Back safely in Bangalore I left the car at RNS Motors in Yeshwantpur for a couple of days to enable them find out what had gone wrong. It was quite surprising when nothing untoward was reported at the time of taking delivery of the car. Assuming that this was a one-off aberration…I let go of any stray thoughts, including the corny ones about God being unwilling or having helped us avert a major disaster/accident.

Fast forward into the future, fifteen years later, the same foursome team in a completely different car that was seemingly fit as a fiddle we encountered an identical problem, this time much beyond the ISRO city Hassan. My wife was in a way pretty convinced that providence had something to do with a second and identical incident. It appeared that the Goddess was indeed sending us a warning signal. The threesome team - both my boys and myself, were however willing to take some calculated chance. Also, I did not want my wife to carry on with a belief that some superior force was behind all this! We continued our journey and I kept a continuous and watchful eye on the temperature indicator. What helped was switching off the air conditioning system and running the car on neutral on a downward incline or flat stretches. In spite of the set-back we did reach the temple town of Sringeri only an hour behind schedule. We got the car checked for any problem, but like the last time, there was apparently nothing amiss. As a precaution we kept a liter of engine coolant handy and kept topping the can as we traveled from Sringeri to Hornadu to keep our date with Goddess Annapoorneshwari. On the return leg we took a detour and spent a night at Vihangama Holiday Resort in Tirthahalli.

Without air conditioning it was mightily warm and humid for the inmates; however the engine behaved very well and did not give us any more cause for worry. At best and on hindsight, I thought that the Omni-present superior power did have a role to play – quite clearly, it made its presence known to all of us and we are eternally grateful for the kindness and blessings showered on us.