The very old Padmanabhaswamy Temple was right down the street from where we were staying, so we asked the driver to drop us off there.

We were surprised that the whole place was all lit up and cordoned off with police. The place was packed and he said there was some special thing going on. We went inside and looked around the temple. It was a beautiful temple: very small, but very beautifully done.

We saw that there was a wedding taking place next door with lots of music and television cameras. At first I thought this was just an ordinary wedding, but then it turned out that this was a reenactment of the wedding of the gods! So this was again an amazing coincidence; this was a reenactment of the wedding of Lord Balaji who resides in Tirupati, which is arguably the most holy of Indian shrines (and also the richest in terms of the the money that people donate to this particular temple). When I asked the gentleman outside how often this kind of wedding happened he said this was the first time since the opening of that particular temple in 1962! Just outside we had just been admiring a bus with all kinds of paintings on it and then on the way out I noticed that this was the actual bus that transported those gods and goddesses there for the wedding.

We were really amazed by the fact that we thought we were just going for a short stroll down the street to see a small temple and we saw some of the most significant gods and goddesses right there. If we had gone there even a half an hour earlier or half an hour later we would’ve missed the wedding entirely!