My Family Trip to Tijara Chandaprabhu Digambar Jain Mandir
Yesterday, amidst cold wave and single digit temperature and with the weather forecast of Delhi NCR showing severe winds blowing, I decided to take my family along with my parents to Tijara at Rajasthan. It was always meant to be a 2 hour long journey that would be met with countless roadblocks due to Government doing road construction activity on NH-48 which connects Gurgaon to Dharuheda. We packed ourselves in our big Maruti car and did a meticulous time bound planning and packing with everyone having picked their favorite seat in the car for both the to-and-fro journey. I got to pick the best seat which was next to the driver. As soon as we left Gurgaon, we saw a long imposing truck-packed section of the road at Manesar that kept giving the impression that it would be a much longer than 6 minute road congestion that was being shown by the GPS in our mobile phones. I took it as the perfect moment to continue reading the Daniel Goleman book "The New Leaders" from where I had left off the previous night. Just reading twenty pages of that fascinating book's chapter on how to become a visionary leader filled the hope inside me that we will soon beat this Manesar traffic and reach Tijara in time to have pooja there.
On the road, we saw plenty of sunflower plantations that were interspersed with wheat which was much smaller in length than the sunflower plantations that had flanked those wheat crops from three sides. Upon seeing this, I realized that it will not take much time for those wheat crops to outgrow the sunflower plantations as the wheat crops can reach ten to twelve feet height. Nonetheless, the wheat crops looked so bright that their image outpowered the beautiful yellow speckled sunflower plants.
We missed the final turn to the temple due to lack of enough signboards, and reached two kilometers ahead as a result. Then I told my driver to ask the people nearby to guide us to the right path to the temple.
Upon reaching the temple, we immediately went to the lunch facility where we saw a nice service by the workers there who were serving some hot and delicious yet nutritious food. One thing good about the food in Jain temples is that it is very healthy and nutritious and there is no food item that is made from any underground crop including potatoes and onions.
After finishing our meal, we did some pooja and aarti. We started with doing aarti of Chandapraphu bhagwan, then Parshavanth bhagwan, and then Lord Mahavir. My father had bought some "chaatras" to be offered to Chandapraphu bhagwan by my father, my son, and I. This also became our first meaningful group-photo taken this year outside of Gurgaon!
Then, we went for performing "vedi" or parikrama or rotation for three times inside of the temple. Inside the temple are two more idols or moortis which made us stop and offer our prayers to them. There are a lot of meaningful scriptures etched on the temple walls that kept drawing my attention while performing those vedis.
Then we went to an adjacent small building where the ash or "mitti" of Chandapraphu bhagwan was kept along with Padmavati lordess idol. We offered our prayers to them as well. I then prayed to the feet of Chandapraphu bhagwan and felt purposeful.
Then we all crossed a bridge to reach another temple area with a large statue of Chandapraphu bhagwan in a sitting position. It is surrounded by idols of all our 24 Jain tirthankaras. We offered our prayers to all of them.
Upon finishing our ritual, we did some shopping and ate a delicious fresh and hot aloo chat along with some other snacks and then sat in the car for our return journey.
Then, I saw water sprinklers sprinkling water in lush green fields with a soothing stillness on both sides of the road, unlike the noise due to constant honking on the Gurgaon roads. We also saw two peahens and some more flora and fauna.
We played some music of my son's choice to when we saw the Aravalli mountain range appear on our right side thereby reminding that we were not more than an hour away from our home.
It was out first family trip to Tijara in four or five years, which ended in a purposeful and a meaningful way.
It was out first family trip to Tijara in four or five years, which ended in a purposeful and a meaningful way.
