Scuba Diving: A Divine Experience.

I live in Chennai and not far is a place called Pondicherry. Pondicherry was a French colony before independence. French are long gone but ‘french’ as an essence is still intact in the city’s architecture, traditions and make up the popular cuisines in most of the restaurants. One more thing that also exists in Pondicherry is the only official PADI scuba diving center on the east coast of India. So, I planned to travel to Pondicherry in order to introduce myself to a new world underwater.

I am an introvert and adore isolation and scuba diving introduced me to a new level of isolation. It was really quite down there and that really helps you to scrape out every last piece of chaos your city life forces you to abide by. Moreover, there weren’t plenty different corals or fishes but that helped me to see scuba diving for what it actually is. Scuba diving is an experience, to survive underwater gives you a sense of achievement and you feel exhilarated. It is, in its most truthful and explicit form an art of surviving under water. I truly am glad to have decided to discover scuba.

The dive site at Pondicherry is called the temple reef and it is a man-made reef. Like humans, fishes too, want homes to live in. And if there is no natural coral, we can provide structures for the fishes to migrate and make them structures their homes. This particular site had a really interesting visitor once in a giant whale shark but I wasn’t that lucky to have seen it on my very first dive. One more thing about this reef that was interesting is its name, ‘temple’. A ‘temple’ is a place where one goes to seek peace and make life’s many calculations and this dive at this reef, did just that for me. It helped me reflect on my life which was a heartwarming experience. I know what I am going to do next, it certainly involves taking up the open water course which will open up many doors for my ‘scuba diving aspirations’, because underwater is not a place where you just go once.