Appar Swami, a prominent Tamil Hindu saint and poet, reciting his philosophy in a televised depiction from the serial "Bharat: Ek Khoj". He was an ardent devotee of Lord Shiva. Har Har Mahadev

Appar (Tamil: அப்பர்), also referred to as Tirunavukkaracar (Tamil: திருநாவுக்கரசர், romanized: Tirunāvukkaracar) or Navukkarasar, was a seventh-century Tamil Shaiva poet-saint. Born in a peasant Shaiva family, raised as an orphan by his sister, he lived about 80 years and is generally placed sometime between 570 and 650 CE.Appar composed 4,900 devotional hymns to the god Shiva, out of which 313 have survived and are now canonized as the 4th to 6th volumes of Tirumurai.One of the most prominent of the sixty-three revered Nayanars, he was an older contemporary of Sambandar. Appar is also known as Tirunavukkaracar (lit. "King of the Tongue, Lord of Language"). His birth-name was Marulneekkiyar. He was renamed Dharmasenar while he studied and later served as the head of a Jain monastery. After he returned to Shaivism and began composing devotional hymns to Shiva, he has been historically referred to as Appar (lit. "father"), after the child poet-saint Sambandar lovingly called him Appar The Tamil Shaiva tradition believes that Appar extolled Siva in 4,900 hymns (49,000 stanzas). Of these 313 hymns (3,130 stanzas) have survived, later compiled in the fourth, fifth and sixth volumes of the Tirumurai, the Tamil poetic canon of Shaiva Siddhanta. The compilation of these books is generally ascribed to Nambiyandar Nambi (10th century CE). Some of Appar's hymns set to various Panns, the melodic modes of Ancient Tamil music – the rest are set to Tirunerisai and Viruttam metres. In the last four decades of his life, he visited on foot no less than 125 shrines of Shiva, scattered over a territory of a one thousand miles (1,600 km). He was the only one of the four kuravars to visit the shrine at Tirukokarnam on the western coast of India. He sang 312 decads comprising 3,056 stanzas of devotion. (Source: Wikipedia) Har Har Mahadev 🕉 🙏