Tirupati Balaji

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Tirupati Balaji murti and Venkateswara Swamy idols Anyone who has stood in the queue at Tirumala knows how short the darshan is. You are moved along almost as soon as you have seen him. What people carry home is rarely the whole figure; it is the face, the crown, the namam, the dark stone under all that gold. That is the reason so many households keep a crowned face rather than a full standing figure, and the reason that when they do buy the full figure, the details have to be right. Lord Balaji, Lord Venkateswara, Venkateshwara, Srinivasa and Govinda are names for one deity, the form of Vishnu at Tirumala. In Telugu households he is Venkateswara Swamy and the piece itself is a Venkateswara Swamy vigraham. Elsewhere the same object is a Tirupati Balaji idol, a Balaji statue, or simply a murti. None of it changes what you are buying. One name catches people out, and it is worth settling before you go any further. Salasar Balaji and Mehandipur Balaji are not this deity. Both are Hanuman, worshipped under the title Balaji at their own temples in Rajasthan, where the word is used more broadly than it is in the south. If either of those is what you came looking for, you want Hanuman rather than anything on this page. How to tell a real Balaji from a generic Vishnu This is the question sitting behind most searches for an original Tirupati Balaji murti, and it has a concrete answer: look at the forehead. The white and red mark is the Vaishnava tilaka, the namam. The two white lines stand for the feet of Vishnu and the red centre is Lakshmi. It is not ornament, and a piece without it is a generic Vishnu that has been given a Balaji name. It is also the first detail a cheap mould loses, because those three thin strokes need a sharp die and a careful hand at the finishing stage. Enlarge the photograph before you order and look at whether the lines are separate and even, or whether they have blurred into one soft band. Two more marks worth checking. The upper hands should carr