Bodhinatha is back in his chair, meeting with guests, blessing Rudraksha malas and signing books. This is Simra and she is shipping her entire trilogy to a friend in Bulgaria 7,966 miles away!

Satguru speaks fans:check out Bodhinatha’s recent upadesha on The River of Life and giving up attachements. Part two comes tomorrow. (see the side bar link)

Countless expressions of appreciation and wonderment to the monks poured forth from this beautiful group. The most frequently asked question of the day: “How do 21 monks create all this with all the programs and daily routines you just mentioned? ”

We had several guests with engineering backgrounds who studied at U.C. Berkeley. Dr. Mehta’s contribution and work on the fly ash foundation was very well received and appreciated by this group of alumni!

All the trenching complete and the channels cut through our side walks, the Siddhidata Kulam finished installing the conduit for the new lines and filled in the trenches in the sidewalks with concrete today.

Click here for report of seminar with parents of children enrolled in in our Saivite Hindu Religion children’s course.

At Kauai Aadheenam, the members have been meeting twice monthly with Sivakatirswami to learn and practice Natchintanai and polish their bhajans. In Mauritius the members here are now doing the same. Here is a report on thei recent gathering on our Saiva Siddhanta Church web site.

Click here for 2nd Natchintanai group learning session

Readers of TAKA know that Happy Cog, one of the world’s top web design companies, is working with the monks to redesign our website and improve access to the wealth of information online we call our “Digital Media Library.”
Greg Storey, the president of Happy Cog west, wrote a blog post about the kick-off meeting on Kauai. Take a look at it here.

Rawle Anders, Director of Customer Services, took many photos of the visit. You can see the monastery through Happy Cog’s eyes here.
Meanwhile, the backstage is busy with an intense and productive back-and-forth between the designers and the monks. Stay tuned for more news.

We have been thinking of adding a parrot design at the corner of the kodungai stone and here Selvanathan Stapathi is seen checking the exact position of the bird.

A top arial view of the new marking. This visualizations have been sudied for a few months now as we have earlier showed similar photos in TAKA ealier last month. Now we are more in a stage of finalizing them to start carving.

More markings and inspections on the kodungai stone.

And of course stapathi is high tech and he always travels with his lenovo and autocad software and whenever there is doubt, the Iraivan temple drawings just popup on his screen and all doubts are cleared precisely.

Today another 60 pilgrims came by bus. They are visiting from the Lakshmi Narayan Hindu Temple, Surrey, British Columbia, Canada.

There is Kulapati Vel Alahan in the middle of the group. He is coordinating the tour.

Off to Iraivan…

Rudrakshas everywhere!

Hug the trees

Such a bright, very devout and joyful group.

The Siddhidata Kulam team is pushing very hard these past few days. The underground work is somewhat disruptive so they are driving hard to complete it in as short a time a possible. We are blessed now to have fairly dry weather, so it is really good to get all these done before we have any torrential down pours that would fill everything up with water.

after the first layer of dirt is put back into the trenches, a plastic caution tape is laid in on top. This then is also covered over.

Any future attempts to dig down will find this tape first, alerting equipment operators to stop because pipes or conduits are below.

Now the team is working on the boxes and switch that lie underground in different locations.