It all started with a group of youngsters, mostly from the I.T industry, wanting to spend their week ends in some purposeful way. They created their yahoo group TEMPLE_CLEANERS , the owner being Rajan Ganesh and the moderator being J. Chandrasekaran.
Getting a call from one Dr. Subramanian, they set to Kovoor a village where the Shiva temple is famous for its Pancharatnam sung on Lord Shiva by the great Trinity singer Shri. Thyagaraja Swamigal, but not the Vishnu temple!
The temple was strewn with plastic waste and bottles all over. January 16th 2006, was the D-day, where in this small group started its first step towards a greater destiny, just cleaning temples, making them accessible for common public to worship.
Then came Ramamurthy an ex- Scandinavian Navy man whose was touching his ripe age of 70, always young at zeal and heart. Most call him as ‘Kovil Ramamurthy’, who paraded us to focus more on rural villages, showing Lingams open to sky, temples inaccessible to mankind and so on…!
We set to find out who can work on temple conservation than cleaning for just one time and retain the heritage looks and antiquity. Luckily, we had the contact of Dr. T . Satyamurthy, archaeologist par excellence who had rich experience in restoring temple all over. He happily consented to guide this motley group of youngsters to appreciate and spread the message of heritage architecture, their values and the wealth it has in many facets!
Starting of as a yahoo group temple_cleaners, and with 7 members in 2006, today we have grown almost 100 times in terms of membership, people ranging mostly from the I.T industry, engineering, art and historians.