Every time I step in to this temple, I am awed by its splendor and grandeur and I am silenced by the God who lives inside in the form of a huge Linga. I am talking about the Thanjavur Periya kovil ( Tanjore Big temple for the benefit of outsiders) which is around an hour's travel from my hometown, Trichy. I had already planned my visit this weekend and my dad and I set out on such a beautiful Saturday which made Tanjore feel like Ooty. Such a huge temple could belittle the huge ego of man and it is the tiny man who has built a temple of this size. This is a must visit to anybody who visits the southern part of Tamilnadu. Pictures (by my phone camera & hence poor quality) do not convey the beauty of what I am describing. King Raja Raja chola built the "Bhrihadeeswarar Temple" probably in 1100 . As my dad and I went around we imagined how this temple would have acted as a place for social gathering, how it was used to foster and grow arts, how it would have been used as a place for refuge during the time of wars.Even though there were inscriptions written in my mother tongue Tamil on the walls of temple, very least of it made sense to me. That’s the variety of Tamil, one in old written form, one in new written form and another in spoken form. This temple is rumored to have had endowments in the form of huge hectares of land in Burma, Srilanka etc (Info courtesy: My dad). It is also a practice of performing an “abhishegam” with chillies to ‘Nandi” for good rains every year. Please make an effort to visit this, even if you are an atheist, at least to experience the joy of seeing such an architectural wonder.