# Thanjai....

Thanjavur had been on my wish list for almost two years.

When I joined Webandcrafts, my colleagues and I started planning a trip there. We planned it many times. Almost every month, there would be some conversation about going. Somehow, it never happened. Work, schedules, life something always came in between.

Then, one day, I just decided to go.

There was an Onam celebration happening at the office the next day. I don’t know whether it was my social anxiety or simply the feeling that I didn’t want to be part of the usual celebration that day, but I decided not to join. Instead, the day before Onam, I boarded a train from Chalakudy to Thanjavur.

I had no proper plan.

I hadn’t booked a cab or planned every place I was going to visit. I reached Thanjavur, freshened up, and went to the Brihadeeswarar Temple like any other tourist.

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I walked around, looked at the architecture, took pictures, saw the sculptures and tried to take in the scale of the place. At that point, I was simply a visitor seeing one of the most remarkable temples in India.

Then went back to town with help of a fellow malayali I met there, also a techie now wandering around like me , searched and found a very good biryani spot

After lunch, I went to the bird park and spent some time there. Later, I found myself walking back towards the Brihadeeswarar Temple.

This time, I wasn’t going back as a tourist.

I went back as an artist or a simple man who wants to experience.

I had my sketchbook and pen with me, and as I entered the temple complex again, something changed in the way I was looking at it.

I started imagining myself living there around a thousand years ago.

What if I were an artist of that time?

Or an engineer, trying to understand how this enormous structure could be designed and built with the knowledge and tools available then?

What if I were a poet who lived somewhere around this temple, writing about the people, the gods, the architecture and everyday life happening around me?

Or a philosopher, sitting somewhere in these premises and thinking about life, death and everything in between?

Or perhaps a spiritual seeker, spending my days in and around the temple, observing life, contemplating existence and waiting for death with a sense of acceptance rather than fear?

I started imagining all these different lives.

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I wasn’t only thinking about Rajaraja Chola I, the king under whose reign this magnificent temple was built. I started thinking about everyone else who must have been part of this world — the architects, sculptors, painters, engineers, poets, priests, dancers, workers and ordinary people who lived around the temple.

What did they see every morning?

What did they think about?

What did they talk about?

What did they believe?

What did they create?

What did they fear?

What did they dream about?

For a moment, I tried to remove myself from the present and look at the place through the eyes of someone from around a thousand years ago.

And somehow, the temple started becoming less like a historical monument and more like a living world.

With that thought, I started sketching.

I sat there for hours, roughly from noon until four or five in the evening. I would draw for a while, stop, look again, walk around, come back and draw again.

I started noticing things I hadn’t noticed during my first visit.

The ground.

The way the different structures occupied the space.

The relationship between the buildings.

The sculptures.

The lines and proportions.

The enormous scale of the architecture.

The old murals.

The tiny details that disappear when you are simply walking around as a tourist.

When you sketch something, you cannot just glance at it.

You have to stay with it.

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You have to understand the shape before you draw it. You start noticing shadows, proportions, negative spaces and small details that a photograph can easily make you ignore.

I also started reading the inscriptions around the temple. Whenever I couldn’t understand something, I used ChatGPT to translate and explain it to me.

Every inscription opened another question.

Every sculpture made me think about the person who carved it.

Every architectural detail made me wonder how someone had imagined it in the first place.

And the more I looked, the more I kept coming back to the same thought:

What kind of people were capable of imagining all this?

We often call something “ancient architecture” and move on.

But standing there made that phrase feel inadequate.

These were people.

People who had ideas.

People who had disagreements.

People who loved, suffered, prayed, created and died.

People who spent years of their lives making something that they probably knew would outlive them.

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And a thousand years later, I was sitting there with a pen in my hand, trying to understand what they had left behind.

At some point during the day, I met Vishnu, who was also from around my place and had come there with his family. I also met another person who helped me along the way, though unfortunately I can’t remember his name.

While walking towards the Saraswathi Mahal Library, someone even asked me in Malayalam, “Evide pokunnu?”

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It was one of those small moments that makes travelling interesting.

You leave Kerala and travel all the way to Thanjavur, and suddenly Malayalam finds you there.

I explored the palace area and visited the Saraswathi Mahal Library. We watched a government documentary about the history of Thanjavur, and slowly the different layers of the place started connecting in my head — the Cholas, the Nayaks, the Marathas, the art, literature, architecture and the cultural history that had accumulated here over centuries.

Thanjavur started feeling less like a destination and more like a layered piece of memory.

But what stayed with me most was that second visit to the temple.

The same place I had visited earlier as a tourist suddenly felt completely different when I returned as an artist.

Maybe that is why I love travelling with a sketchbook.

Photography allows you to capture a place in a second.

Sketching forces you to stay.

You have to sit there.

You have to look.

You have to think.

And sometimes, you start imagining yourself belonging to a completely different time.

That day, I wasn’t only sketching the Brihadeeswarar Temple.

I was trying to sketch the world around it.

The people.

The ideas.

The craftsmanship.

The spirituality.

The questions.

Maybe even the silence.

Somewhere between those hours of sitting, sketching, reading inscriptions and imagining the people who created the place, I completely forgot about work.

There were no deadlines.

No meetings.

No notifications.

No pressure to be productive.

Just a thousand-year-old temple, a sketchbook, a pen and several hours of uninterrupted observation.

That, perhaps, was the real reason I had travelled.

To escape the reality that I had been living in every day.

To step away from work pressure.

To sit still.

To journal without necessarily writing.

To create something while I was there.

To think.

To observe.

To experience a culture instead of simply consuming it as a tourist.

And perhaps most importantly, to remind myself that there are other ways of spending a day.

A day doesn’t always have to be productive.

Sometimes a day can simply be spent sitting on the ground of a thousand-year-old temple and wondering what it would have been like to be an engineer, an artist, a poet, a philosopher or a spiritual seeker living there a thousand years ago.

Later, I took that sketch and painted it.

So the journey didn’t really end when I left Thanjavur.

The place became a sketch.

The sketch became a painting.

And the painting became a memory of that particular day.

By around 6:30 in the evening, I was heading back.

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Looking back, I think the most interesting part of the trip was not simply visiting Thanjavur.

It was experiencing the same place twice.

First as a tourist — walking around, taking pictures, seeing the famous monument.

And then as an artist — slowing down, sitting still, looking at the ground, the buildings, the sculptures, the history and the people behind all of it.

Maybe that is what I really want from travelling.

Not just to see places, but to spend enough time with them that they start revealing something different.

To understand history by standing where it happened.

To understand people by meeting them unexpectedly.

To create something while I am there.

To carry a little piece of the place back with me.

And sometimes, simply to escape the pressure of everyday life and sit quietly with a pen in my hand.

I went to Thanjavur after postponing it for almost two years.

I thought I was going there to see a temple.

I came back having spent a day imagining a thousand different lives within it.

Maybe that’s what travel really is for me.

Not just moving from one place to another, but moving between different ways of seeing.

Sometimes as a tourist.

Sometimes as an artist.

Sometimes as a historian.

Sometimes as a philosopher.

And sometimes, just as a person sitting quietly, trying to understand what it means to be here.