Who painted these things?

Yesterday we took Kingfisher Air  from Chennai to Madurai. Now you know that I am not rabidly right wing but, in India I now know that private enterprise always works best. You may have read about our travails with Indian Airlines.  I also bemoan the lack of working fountains at government sponsored monuments in Agra and Udaipur which would have made the gardens and buildings so much more than mere monuments.  Not so with those attractions run privately.  There, by and large, the fountains work and some actual curation seems the order of the day with period furnishings and pictures and some attempt at context.  I am thinking of Mehrengahr Fort and City Palace.  But I wax on.  Take it from me.  In India entrepreneurship reigns, when unleashed from government.
But that is not what I wanted to write about.  Today I want to tell you about the wonderful temples at Madurai.  These are done in the South Indian style which is moulded and stuccoed and painted to beautiful effect.  The temples at Madurai are some of the oldest in India begun, in rudimentary fashion at 1600BC but most of what we see today was created on the same site between 700AD and 1800AD.

As with all Hindu temples, from what I can tell, there is a morning ceremony that greets the day and an everning ceremony that puts all the gods to rest.  We attended the evening ceremony and then I got up to take a few pics in the morning before we left for Cochin this morning.