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Thursday 29 August 2013

Tirupati temple near Pune (Venky’s Balaji Temple)

                 Tirupati Balaji_View
Tirupati Balaji temple is also known as Sri Venkateshwara temple, near Narayan pura village, Pune which is built by ‘Venky’s Chicken’ company (Sri Venkateshwara Hatcheries), and hence also called Venky’s Balaji. It is a good drive from Pune’s Chandani Chowk via the Bangalore highway.
The road is well marked for directions to the Venkateshwara temple. The temple itself is very good – the parking is about 200 meters away from the temple premises, and the parking area can be muddy and slushy in the monsoons. Once you deposit your footwear and wash your hands, a red carpet strip will take you to the temple complex. Within the temple, before you start  to enter the long roundabout path to sanctum sanctorum, you would need to deposit the mobiles and cameras at a counter designated for such valuables. Though the walk may be a bit roundabout, the temple is generally not very crowded. You can have good darshans and there‘s a mirror placed at the correct angle which also allows you darshan from behind. There are many other smaller temples for various gods within the temple complex, all in the beautiful marble or black stone. The prasad  is the popular bundi laddu – they make only 5000 of them daily – or bundi – if they run out of laddus. Both are equally delicious as expected. Thankfully, just like the real temple in Thirumala , there are not too many shops and beggars irritation.
Bang oposite the temple front entrance is the Hanuman ji temple – and coincidentally it was Saturday ! (Saturday is Hanumanji’s day).
Post our paying respects to Hanuman ji, we proceeded to the exit. From what I learnt there are no decent accommodation around this temple. It was a great outing and we had a sumptuous lunch and jeera soda at Joshi Vadavale on the way back to Pune!

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