The Consulate Officer of the U.S. Embassy is supposed to be the final arbiter on whether a visa application is approved or not. But in India, this office might have a competitor – the Chilkur ‘Visa Balaji’ temple in Telangana.
With immigration controls on the rise worldwide, from the U.K. to the United States and even Saudi Arabia, Indians seeking foreign shores dread the visa appointment. Many believe that performing 11 circumambulations around the temple will lead to its deity, Balaji Venkateshwara, granting your wish. More often than not, this wish is for a successful visa application.
Rangarajan, the 500-year-old-temple’s media-savvy priest, recounts his experience with an American journalist.
She asked me a straightforward question. ‘How is it that the visa is given by our embassy, and the people are doing rounds here?’…Then I told her one situation. Imagine a devotee who is doing pradakshina (circumambulations) at the time. This person went to the embassy three times. Three times the visa was rejected. [Before his fourth attempt] he came to Chilkur, and he went back to the embassy in Hyderabad.The visa was stamped. The embassy is the same, the officers are all the same, the passport is the same and the documents are the same. But what changed the entire situation? The blessing of Balaji
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