Darshan in tirupati

Darshan of Sri Venkateswara

One of the busiest pilgrimage sites on earth: tens of thousands of people a day come to stand in front of the deity of Venkateswara for a few seconds. The actual darshan is very brief: you move through a covered queue for hours, pass through the inner sanctum in a slow shuffle, look, and are moved along. Understanding that the queue is the pilgrimage, not an obstacle to it, is the difference between a bad day and a good one.

The temple runs almost around the clock and the queues move through in shifts. What matters is not the hour but which queue you are in: the free one runs four to twelve hours and twenty to thirty on peak days, the paid one one to three. You wait inside the Vaikuntam Queue Complex, a separate building of halls, benches and fans three hundred metres from the temple, not out in the open.