Wandering around many years ago in the 12th century temple of the dancing god Nataraja at Chidambaram, I wondered aloud as to how its builders managed to lift those huge blocks of stone to such heights to create such a magnificent structure... An old man, seemingly as ancient as the temple, his forehead split with the vertical streak of his ancestral faith, mumbled in Tamil “when the stone is sleeping, you can lift it with one finger”