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The festival of nine nights or navarAtri culminates on the tenth day vijayadaSami. This is a day of victory and that is why it is called the tenth day of victory. There are three stories associated with this day. This is the day on which the paaMDavas, the sons of king pAMDu, finished their year of living incognito in the court of king virATa. arjuna, along with uttarakumAra, retrieves his weapons hidden in a Sami tree (vanni or banni) and fights the mighty kaurava army to recover the herds of cows of the king virATa stolen by them.

We're getting into the spirit of celebrating Fall festivals, the first being Navratri - festival of the Goddesses. Many of our members celebrate Navratri with great fervor, by putting up a traditional display of dolls, popularly called as "Golu". Last year, our Marapachi doll decor contest was a huge hit with our members. Inspired by their enthusiasm, we're conducting both Marapachi doll decor contest, and Golu contest, for this year.

The image links from the right vertical bar on the front page gives you more details.

I have introduced the concept of sOnA extension in http://www.ikolam.com/node/15412?p=10760

The iKolam.com server was down roughly for about 20 hours starting from 15th midnight (PST). We have had intermittent issues with our server and we are currently planning on migrating the server to a more stable environment. The move will happen during the upcoming week and this will result in interruptions.

Please bear with us during this process.

Hi friends - we are glad to announce a Chennai Meet (Part 2).

This time we have decided to meet at Sumathi's residence in Anna Nagar. Hopefully we should be able to meet sometime around end October or beginning November on any convenient weekend. Date and time will be fixed later on and informed by email.

Please upload pictures of worship/puja in the Cafe ( by using the "create topic" option). The "upload rangoli" option is to be used for uploading rangolis and craft works. We would also like to request you to keep the rangoli images separate (however small each rangoli is), and not upload them in a collage format.

After viewing the rangOli of SrImati lakshmIdEvi, it occurred to me that it may be nice to explain the two types of yatIs used in music - gOpucCha (like the tapering of a cow's tail) and srOtOvAha (like the broadening flow of a stream). muuttusvAmi dIkshita is quite famous for these. The song on varalakshmI has the former one (with longer words it reduces to smaller words). Here is a song of mine, if you want it to call so, that has both (ascending and descending). I will give meaning for one, except for one word change the rest follow similar pattern.

Hi all,

Hope all of you had a wonderful summer and are enjoying August!

I recently wrote about Naga Panchami, and also wanted to write about Garuda Panchami, since it falls on the same day - August 14 of this year! Garuda Panchami is dedicated to the worship of Garuda, the vaahanam, or vehicle, of Lord Vishnu. It celebrates Garuda’s devotion to his mother Vinathai, and as such, it also celebrates the devotion and love between mothers and their children. On this day, mothers pray for the well-being of their children, and aspire for their children to emulate Lord Garuda in his noble qualities. I happened to come across some of the comments on my Naga Panchami post, and I found it interesting that Garuda Panchami could also be observed between brothers and sisters! According to the tradition, when the brother would leave his sister at her in-laws’ home and return to the snake-infested fields, the sister would seek Nagadevata’s assistance in protecting her brother.