Kanyakumari - Where India Ends [India 2022]
It’s the tip of India, where three seas meet. Did you know it’s south-er than Anuradhapura, almost parallel to Dambulla?
There’s a sense of accomplishment in visiting Kanyakumari, especially as I had traveled down from the snowy hills of Manali, Himachal Pradesh. The longest train route in India is from Kanyakumari to Dibrugarh (Arunachal, near Thailand), a distance of 4,200 km, covered in 74.5 hours. Today you can find people casually speaking Malayalam and Tamil in Kanyakumari, as it was ruled by the Kingdoms of Kerala during different periods of its history.
Thiruvalluvar (whose historicity is being debated) is the author of Thirukkural. This 2300 to 1500-year-old book of two-line poems is considered one of the greatest works on ethics, and the most translated of Tamil literary works. His statue erected here is 133 feet tall, representing the 133 chapters of Thirukkural.
Swami Vivekananda is a 19th-century Hindu monk & philosopher who introduced Hindu concepts to the western world. He was a vegetarian, but he also pointed out that according to Hindu Vedas “one who does not eat beef is not a good Hindu”. He briefly meditated on a rock a few miles off the coast, so they built an ashram there.
Rameswaram
In addition to Dhanushkodi & Mandapam around Rameshwaram, I visited Abdul Kalam’s house. Before becoming the most popular Indian president, he was a key aerospace engineer who led the Indian missile & nuclear programs and was called the “missile man of India”. I also visited the 17th c. palace of Sethupathi kings who ruled the Sethu kingdom.
In some kovils of Rameshwaram, they demo some large coral stones that keep floating on water. Legend says, two monkeys in Rama’s army had a curse, such that anything they write on would float on water. So, Hanuman made them write Rama’s name and throw it into the water, and used the floating stones during the construction of Ram Sethu. To me, they just looked like big pot-shaped coral stones where air might be trapped in the bottom.
