Author:
Publication: The Economic Times
Date: November 3, 2014
URL: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-11-03/news/55720467_1_hindu-temple-society-lord-ganesha-medium

In 1968, on a trip to his India, Alagappa Alagappan dreamed that an ancient Hindu god told him to visit a medium. So he did, and on his first visit, the medium read palm leaves to tell him that Lord Ganesha wanted to settle in a city beginning with the letter N.

On the medium's instruction, by his account, Alagappan returned the next day, and he learned that Ganesha had asked for more: He wanted temples to be established throughout North America. On the third day, the medium told Alagappan that it was his job to arrange that. So he did. By the time of his death, on October 24 at age 88, Alagappan, a retired UN official who lived in Queens, had become "the father of the temple-building movement in North America," as a Hindu leader in Texas wrote in an email to Alagappan's family.

 His work began in the wake of a landmark change in US immigration law in Congress in 1965: the replacement of a national-origins quota system, which had been in place since the 1920s, with a preference system, which favoured immigrants with skills or with relatives in the United States.

 Today, there are 700 Hindu temples in the United States, serving a Hindu population that since 1965 has increased thirtyfold, to about 1.5 million.

 Alagappan started the project close to home, in his adopted city whose name began with N. "With nothing but faith, I began the task of getting a temple built in New York," Alagappan told Madras Musings, a newspaper published in Chennai in 1998.

 Meeting in his living room, he and others, some of them also UN officials, formed a planning group with the aim of making the increasing number of immigrants from India feel at home in their new country. In 1970, they founded the Hindu Temple Society of North America.

 Seven years later, the society dedicated the Maha Vallabha Ganapati temple in Flushing, Queens, on Bowne Street, on a site once occupied by a Russian Orthodox Church. It was one of the first two Hindu temples in the United States. Worshippers have continued to stream to the temple over the 38 years since it was built, to breathe in the fragrances of flowers and incense and to sway to traditional music. (There are no scheduled services.) The journey was not always easy. Neighbours at first resisted the temple's presence in their mostly white, middle-class residential neighbourhood. As recently as 2002, vandals burned the chariot the temple used for an annual public procession.

 But Alagappan never strayed from his commitment to ecumenism and tolerance. The circular logo he designed for the temple shows a Christian cross, a Star of David and an Islamic crescent and star, demonstrating what the temple's website calls a belief in "the totality and fundamental unity at the core of all religion." At the top of the circle is the symbol for "Om," which Hindus consider the primal sound of the universe.

 He lived in Jamaica Estates, Queens, and died at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, his son Arun said. Alagappan was born on December 3, 1925, in Kanadukathan, a town in southern India. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Presidency College in Chennai. He went on to earn a master's degree in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He also studied law and became a member of the British bar. While studying in London, he worked for the British Broadcasting Corp. and once interviewed a pope.

Returning to India, he became a reporter for the newspaper The Hindu. He then went to work for the United Nations, first in Bangkok. He transferred to New York in 1961. His positions included deputy director of the natural resources and energy division. One of those who joined him in starting the temple society was CV Narasimhan, the undersecretary-general. The group dedicated a temple in Pittsburgh around the same time as the one in New York. Alagappan helped start temples at first by contributing $51, following the tradition that one extra dollar is a good luck charm to ensure that another $50 will materialise.

 In later years, he gave contributions of $1,001. He went on to start temples in India as well as in the United States.