All is well at Kauai Aadheenam. The Ekadanta Kulam gave their report today. Saravananathaswami and Sadhaka Dandapani have been working to upgrade their news announcements to a lovely HTML format. Saravananathaswami also completed a mailing for the Kauai Aloha Endowment which is preparing to make its first community grant since it’s inception… another seed planted by Gurudeva coming to fruition. He has also been working on future travel plans as well as documents for those young men interested in monastic life.

Sadhaka Dandapani spend most of his time hosting guests and the stream of visitors is rising as summer vacation time is here. When he has a few hours free he’s working on preparations for Guru Purnima and the big Open House we will have this year.

This team of two does a huge job!

Acharya Kumarswami and Yogi Japendranatha complete their participation in a conference put on by Adobe for our primary publications tool here: Adobe InDesign CS2. It was a very fruitful time and we unexpectedly made personal contacts with Adobe’s top engineers.

That was over yesterday and today they joined California Golden Gate Mission for satsang and Kulapati Deva Rajan’s home. Here they are greeted at the entrance….

Acharya leads the group in a guided Shum meditation and tells us news about the Aadheenam. (Garland was flown in fresh from Hawaii!)

Yogi Japendranatha greets Siva in Deva Rajan’s home.

Acharya takes questions from the Mission members and guests.

Yogi shares some thoughts….

Kulapati Easvan Param unveils Chandra Param’s stage design for the upcoming September 25th Iraivan Temple fundraiser concert.

Graphic artist Markendaya Sendan chats with Yogi Japendranatha.

Mahendran and Sujatha Bakeirathan from London, UK, attended the morning Siva puja. Of Sri Lankan origin, the elders in their family are devotees of Satguru Yogaswami. They had heard about us from their aunt so they decided to include us in their Hawaiian vacation. They also felt blessed to meet Bodhinatha this morning.

Matt and Elsa from San Diego, married a week ago, were among our guests today.

The Iron That Is Changing the World

Paramacharya Palaniswami went on a shoot the other day and we bring you his offerings… a small documentary on the key tool for stone temple architecture: the iron chisel, and some videos.

Here we are at the “patrai” — the blacksmith forge, hand made by our previous silpi team. It is a simple clay bed with a 1 foot cubic fire pit that has a pipe going out to the back. In the back a rotary bellow is hand cranked to drive air into and up through the bottom of the small fire pit which is filled with a kind of coal called “coke”.

Chisels that are dull are placed into this ancient style furnace…

Palaniswami took 4 short videos of the silpis and we have mounted these all onto a single pages… at 11 megs each, this is really for broad band users. Please go to our main Video index page and click on the new link.

The temperature rises to a point that nearly melts the tips of the chisels.

A pile of dull chisels awaiting their turn to enter the little inferno. They may have only been used for 10 minutes before being set aside for a sharp chisel.

One silpi deftly uses tongs to pass the heated chisel to another one who swiftly pounds the molten head of the chisel back to a sharp point.

From a dull point…

… to a sharp point with just a few highly skilled blows….

…and then, into the water to be chilled and tempered, ready for use.

Here is yet another project that Senthil Rajasankara, the son of Jiva and Kanmani, our worksite managers, have achieved recently. It is the biggest sign ever done in granite in India.

This was recently exported to UK where it will be the biggest granite sign in that nation.

It is done
for a company that is involved with large scale soil control and land forming.

The size of the single-stone sign 19.5 feet long, 6.5 feet high and 18 inches thick.

It weighs a whopping 32,000 pounds.