I just reached home today morning-what a journey it was to the station and there after. At 10am, started on CSAW CTF. I solved a few “crypto” questions-they were quite easy IMO! But, it’s nevertheless encouraging. Of course, Leet More managed to breeze through-they started much later and made it to 13th in no time :D . Anyway mom asks me to set out at around 7 in the evening to buy a few stuff. And the walk around Mylapore’s Mada street was a wonderful experience!

Mada street is a set of four roads around the Kapaleeshwar temple(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapaleeshwarar_Temple)-east, west, north and south. It’s a sleepy place in the morning but springs to life in the evening. The south mada street has a lot of shops and the bus stop for the temple. The temple can be accessed from all roads except this road.

The east mada street is notable for the evening market where several vendors come and sell vegetables on the street. There are so many varieties of vegetables being sold-it’s awesome! I just was spellbound the variety available-not even half of this is there in Calicut’s main market!

From here, I headed to the north mada street which houses the temple chariot right in front of the entrance to the temple. It is taken round the temple annually during April as a part of a festival. I’m hoping that I can come during that time to see the chariot and the procession.

From the north mada street, I headed out to west mada street and was shocked to see the entire road-the ENTIRE road filled with “gollu bommai”-dolls that are displayed in every household for Navarathri(also known as Dusshera in the north india). From several idols of gods including Krishna, Shiva and Anathashayanam to village scenes, cricket teams, fruits and much more, there were dolls for almost everything! The craftsmanship was just amazing-each doll had so much detailing done that it looked amazing. I was tempted to buy a few by just looking at it-few minutes of talking would have probably convinced me!

I was really sad that I didn’t have a camera to take the pics of what I saw :( . I will come back sometime and take a whole bunch of pics! If you every visit Chennai, stay before and during Navarathri. Along with West Bengal, Tamil Nadu is one place where this festival is widely celebrated where each and every household will have this “gollu” on display and neighbours visit each other to see them.

Till next time! Ciao!