--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Rick Archer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
"http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2007/08/26/iyer.georgia.hindu.temple.cn WOW! Maybe Maharishi could take a lesson. This magnificent massive temple was built for only $19 million. In a Suburb of Atlanta, a Temple Stops Traffic By BRENDA GOODMAN New York Times, July 5, 2007 http://tinyurl.com/274ege ATLANTA, July 4 As Ponce de Leon Avenue snakes eastward out of Atlanta into the suburbs, the groomed lawns, the painted brick colonials and the neighborhood parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted give way to giant supermarkets, gas stations, strip malls and used-car dealerships with signs painted in several languages. Even the name of the road changes from Ponce, as it is known to in-towners, to the more utilitarian Lawrenceville Highway, helpfully alerting drivers who might be unfamiliar with Atlanta's suburban sprawl that they will eventually reach Lawrenceville. In the midst of this bleak assault to the senses is a novel building that is certain to grab motorists' attention, and perhaps even cause a few car accidents. Sitting like a wedding cake atop a mound of red clay in the suburb of Lilburn is the Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, a Hindu temple that shares an intersection with a Publix supermarket and a Walgreens pharmacy. The exterior is a confection of creamy hand-carved limestone and sparkling Italian Carrara marble. Pink sandstone decorates the interior spaces. When this building, topped with red-and-white flags to ward off evil, opens for worship in a few weeks, it will officially be one of the largest Hindu temples in the world. The main reaction in Lilburn, a town so conservative that it recently outlawed pastimes like pool, karaoke and trivia contests in establishments that serve alcohol an apparent effort to keep bars out has been puzzlement. "I think people in that area didn't really understand what they were fixing to have there," said William Reynolds, principal architect at Smallwoods, Reynolds, Stewart, Stewart, the firm that worked with Indian designers to build the mandir, a Sanskrit word for the place where the mind becomes still and the soul floats freely. The stone for the project was shipped piece by piece from India, where craftsmen had sculptured it into more than 500 designs including rosettes, leaves, feathers and lacy geometric patterns. The thousands of sections, ranging from five ounces to five tons, each with its own bar code, have been assembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle based on instructions for religious buildings written into scripture thousands of years old. Although the engineers said they had not counted the number of pieces they used, a mandir in London that served as a model for the Lilburn building required more than 26,000 individual parts. The price tag for the project, $19 million, has been kept down by the thousands of hours of volunteer labor donated by congregants of the BAPS Swaminarayan temple in Clarkston, Ga., who will move from a converted skating rink when the temple is completed in August. For more than two years homemakers and retirees have been polishing the stonework by hand and cooking for the construction workers. Hundreds of volunteers installed more than 50,000 plants for the landscaping. "It comes from your inner heart," said a woman who insisted on being identified only as Minal because she said it would be unseemly to call attention to herself. "The temple has inspired my 4-year-old to get up from his computer, and nothing can do that," she said. "Every evening we are going to go down there to worship, and it's going to make a tremendous difference on our kids' brains." Inspirational though it may be, some locals feel that the temple might be more at home near the Ganges than the Rocky Food Mart. "Mostly people are proud to have it here," said Jack Bolton, the mayor of Lilburn. "But I've heard from a few who say it doesn't fit in with the character of anything else in the area." "If it was a big Baptist church, I don't think anyone would have objected," he added. In many ways the architectural juxtaposition reflects the booming diversity of metropolitan Atlanta's neighborhoods. A survey conducted in the Atlanta area in 1985 found there were just 15 to 20 core Swaminarayan families here. Today there are about 900 regular members in metropolitan Atlanta and as many as 6,000 worshipers who flock here from other places on festival days. (Atlanta has one of the fastest-growing South Asian populations in the United States, according to Census data.) ...
