Bodhinatha and Shanmuganathaswami arrived back at the monastery on August 16th, and we continue now with their “Across America” journey report.

Here is Bodhinatha giving a talk in the evening at the Nashville, Tennessee, Ganesha Temple. It was his now very polished talk on the “Two Questions on the Minds of Youth.”

Stepping back in time to August 8th, arriving at the Stelter Company headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa, they were met by customer service representative Tori Tracy. Tori introduced them to various members of the Stelter staff and toured their facilities. Here they visited the state-of-the-art offices of the pre-press department.

Stelter specializes in printing, web services and seminars specializing in planned giving. This is their print shop. Print shop manager, Russ Swanson, explains the workings of their cutting, collating, binding and shipping room. Production coordinator Erik Potter is on the right.

We met for a few hours with our talented Stelter team. To the left of Shanmuganathaswami is Suzanne Mineck, Tori Tracy, Christy Nelsen, Russ Swanson and Erik Potter. This team is helping to develop the planned giving program for Hindu Heritage Endowment.

We flew from Des Moines on August 10th with a short stop in Chicago and arrived in the Music City of Nashville, Tennessee. Long time associate and friend Dr. Hiranya Gowda met us at the airport, and we spent some time visiting at his home. He and his wife Saraswathi were our hosts while in Nashville, and here we are at their home in Forest Hills.

We also met with Dr. Babu and his wife Radha. She gives tours at the Nashville Ganesha Temple for school children in the community.

Dr. Gowda took us to the Parthenon, a full size replica built in the 1800’s to celebrate the centennial of independence day for the USA. Originally built of plaster, this building was renovated in concrete with a covering of small pebbles on the columns. We noticed a few cracks in the sidewalks. They could have really used fly-ash technology back then!

Inside is this huge statue of the Greek Goddess Athena. She has many symbols which are similar to Hinduism such as the snake and that huge spear or vel. We appreciated the amount of time and work which went into the gold leafing. Nashville is often referred to the “Athens of the South.”

Our next stop was the Country Music Hall of Fame. This is a huge museum of relics, musical instruments and music of the country music stars. The museum and displays gave us a lot of ideas for our Iraivan Temple reception center.

While in Nashville we met with Venkat Dhurjati. He has been helping us develop a new web store for www.minimela.com. He had planned to meet us at the Ganesha temple in the evening but could not come because of arriving guests from India. When Shanmuganathaswami called him about his schedule he was driving home from work. When he asked where we were we told him we were in the Holiday Inn by a Target store. He said “I’m driving right by there this very moment.” So a few minutes later he knocked on our door. Bodhinatha called this one of those “small miracles.”

We took this photo of the Ganesha temple at night. Read about the temple at http://www.ganeshatemple.org/

In the evening Bodhinatha gave a talk.

The next day we spent some extra time in the Nashville airport due to the plane’s mechanical problems. It gave us extra time to take care of some research, emails and other computer tasks. We arrived in Washington DC late at night and were met by Vayudeva Varadan. The next day Bodhinatha was greeted by the priests of the Murugan Temple of North America. You can visit the temple online at www.murugantemple.org.

One main purpose of this trip was to attend the festive activities of the Nallur and Katargama Festival held every year at the Murugan Temple of North America. We arrived at the temple as the kavadi parade was coming back into the temple.

Here we see the kavadi participants dancing in ecstatic devotion to Lord Muruga.

Some of the devotees are very intense with their worship and love for Lord Muruga.

Everyone was momentarily transported back to Sri Lanka with the sounds of the tavil and nadaswaram.

Bodhinatha and Shanmuganathaswami sat near the homa fire. There were too many people to count attending this special day’s events. We were told that many people came from New York and New Jersey.

Dharmalingam Siddhan drove from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his mother Lee and daughter Dhara. Dharmalingam was able to video most of Bodhinatha’s talk.

Bodhinatha’s group of devotees handed out free Hindu literature during the day. This group includes Nigel and Inpah Subramaniam, Vayudeva Varadan, Pathmini Saravanapavan and Master Course student Roman Hunt. They collected names and addresses to send the Ten Questions People Ask About Hinduism and Raising Children as Good Hindus booklets. They also pre-sold copies of the book “What is Hinduism?” of which the monastery is printing in January of 2007.

Two of the temple priests carry the kumbhas inside the Murugan shrine.

Devotees receive blessings from the kumbha water.

Bodhinatha’s talk was well received by young and old alike.

Many of the children attend Tamil classes at the temple. Here they are gathered to sing some bhajans for Lord Murugan.

The children enjoy talking with Bodhinatha as they relate well with his style of reaching out to the youth. The children have all kinds of questions, and Bodhinatha carefully answers each one.

The Mardemootoo family doing a wonderful job gold-leafing the Navagrahas.

They look stunning.

Work continued with great energy today on Iraivan Temple today.

Craig Kawakami’s team built the forms for the big pour of the Nandi Mandapam foundation next week.

They are making it STRONG!

The real action was out at Anna Purna gardens where a test concrete pour was taking place. The goal being to see how this concrete with a high percentage of Portland cement being replaced by coal fly ash would perform in the pumps.

Several teams arrived.

It is just a test pour for checking the new recipe of high-density, fly-ash mix. Just one truck today, then 70 more next week!

The test is putting two small flat foundations near the garden.

This is the testing engineer, with his slump tools.

The concrete truck pours into a massive concrete pump truck.

With long booms, they pump into the forms.

OK, here it comes!

Yoginathaswami, Talaivar of the Siddhidata Kulam along with his team of monks have been very, very busy coordinating all the activities. It’s always a refreshing moment when all the coordination and planning finally come together and you have nothing to do but stand back and watch for a few moments. Success!

Craig’s team at work. They are so skilled, they make a hard task look easy. Our garden shed will be built on this pad, and a compost system will be erected on the first one you saw.

Hard work in the hot sun, so the monastery offered to feed the crews. About 12 or 15 in all! You can watch our movie of the day which documents the entire process.