US temple tower completed
A NEW tower at the Sri Venkateswara Temple in Cary, New York, was inaugurated by North Carolina governor Roy Cooper in the presence of hundreds of Hindu-american devotees.
The completion of the 26m Tower of Unity and Prosperity comes 13 years after the temple construction started in 2009, and is now the tallest of its kind in North America, according to temple leaders.
“What a wonderful day this is, especially in times of trouble ... walking into this temple with reverence and leaving your worries on the outside for just a while. That’s something we all need to do, but then we can always leave the temple with even more determination than ever to address those worries, and to make sure we’re doing something about it,”
Cooper said.
The approval for the tower was granted in 2019, and construction began in April 2020, “right at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic”, said Lakshminarayanan Srinivasan, general secretary of the temple’s board of trustees.
According to Srinivasan, around $2.5 million (about R46m) from more than 5 000 donors were collected from the “donate a brick” programme, which invited Indian-americans from across the country to contribute whatever they could to complete the tower. Srinivasan said that there were additional plans for expansion, including an assembly hall.
He said there were plans for fountains and a manicured landscape.
The temple is modelled after India’s famous Sri Venkateswara Temple in Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, and is known to be the largest Hindu temple in North America.
Sri Venkateswara Temple was built after a growing demand in 1988 by Indians living in Triangle, North Carolina, who wanted the grandeur and artwork of South Indian temples reproduced.
Fourteen artisans were brought in from India to hand-carve the temple’s decorative Hindu idols out of cement.
The expansion of the temple comes at a time when the Indian population in Triangle, also known as Raleighdurham-chapel Hill, is growing.
It is reported that 425 000 Asian Americans live in North Carolina with
Indian-americans making up the largest ethnic group. |