Almost four years ago Google Maps started providing high resolution pictures of parts of India. It excited the devotee in me and locating temples became a huge thrill and hobby for me.
Having grown up listening to stories of how my grandfather had visited many of the 108 Divya Desam temples and I was very interested in visiting the same. When I started living away from India I tried to visit a few of them every time during my India visit. Being born and brought up in Madras, Triplicane Sri Parthasarathy is my favourite. It thrilled me so much to see the Triplicane temple as well as Sri Rangam Temple (my maternal grandfather is from Sri Rangam) in Google maps gave me the feeling that I have won a lottery.
As Google extended the coverage so did my thirst for mapping the Divya Desam temples. My aim was to help all those who are unable to visit the temples - due to living overseas, old age and other disabilities to have the pleasure of doing a Virtual Darshan on Google Map.
I cannot describe the excitement I had every time when high resolution pictures for a temple location became available. In the early years (2007 - 09) Google would never provide name of location along with such zoom details for Tamil Nadu / India. The collaborative efforts of local through Wikimapia, other map sites, detailed cartographic maps, I literally knew how to locate the name of places villages small towns looking at the satellite imagery.
During this mapping I learnt that most of the towns had Shiva temple as well as Vishnu Temple so in order to identify the temple with the satellite image one had to know the direction faced by the deity, pictures of temple showing the location of different sannadhis, flag post from virtually any of the picture sites picassaweb, pbase, flickr and so on. I learnt the geography of the requisite parts Tamil Nadu and Kerala in minute detail. All the information I used to correlate the temple location were from the net.
There were no set guidelines, rulebooks or any parameters to guide me other than the thirst for Divine Worship and knowledge.
Till now I had not created a blog of the maps and had allowed it to be found by searches in google maps, wikipedia etc. However since the search system seems to have changed I have decided to publish the same in a blog.
Till now my Divya Desam maps have had a hit of over 12,000, Navagraha Maps about to touch 5000 and Ahobilam Nava Narasimhar maps over 9000.
Hopefully more devotees will find it useful.Blog Search
View 108 Divya Desam / 108 Vaishnava Divya Desams Temples in a larger map
View Ahobilam (Divya Desam / Nava Narasimhar Temple) in a larger map
View Navagraha Temples in a larger map
