“Ramlalla will be adorned with a Surya Tilak at the same time every Ram Navmi – Here’s how it will work”, Swarajyamag, April 13, 2024:
“About a year after starting work on the ‘Surya Tilak’ at Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, sunrays will grace the Ram Lalla idol on 17 April, on the occasion of Ram Navami,”, S K Panigrahi, the project’s chief scientist at CBRI Roorkee, tells Swarajya. At around 12 pm on Wednesday, 17 April, the rays of the Sun will fall on the forehead of the 51-inches tall murti that represents the five-year-old form of Shri Ram.
The sunlight will adorn Ramlalla’s forehead with a circular ’tilak’, measuring 75mm. This phenomenon will last for three to four minutes and will symbolise a Surya tilak of the Suryavanshi. On every Ram Navmi hence, the garbhagriha will be illuminated thus by the sun. This draws inspiration from the thirteenth-century Sun temple at Konark in Odisha.
The team setting up the Surya tilak started the special project in April 2023, with studies and calculations conducted by experts from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Central Building Research Institute (CBRI), Roorkee, and Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bengaluru. The chief scientist says, “There had been many challenges, including the temple’s location in a dense settlement, weight and thickness of the stone structure, fluctuating sun positions each year, with the shifting dates for Ram Navmi…….”
Read the full article at Swarajyamag.com
