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Dear Friends,

Our roots are in India but this country is the place where we work, live, and die. It is here that we are raising our families. We have built our temples throughout the US.This work of building temples is important as it documents our efforts to cultivate and sustain our religion.We do this because we realize that our Religion has an important place in our family lives. Our work in the Sodom Hutchings temple is incomplete. Please join me on November13th to celebrate the purnahuti yagna, for the completion of our temple.

Some of us will remember a meeting at the Liberty Administration building about thirteen years ago. We had gathered together to discuss the need for constructing the proper temple. We listened to a talk by Mr.Patel, the Temple Architect, that temple science has been developed by our ancestors and has been documented in the Vastushastra over a thousand years ago. He described that a properly constructed temple is like an antenna for prayer to Bhagwan. Thus, any individual and collective worship within it bring tremendous benefits to the local community.

Currently, we hold frequent gatherings in our temple. We can obviously pray anywhere as our Dharma does not define strict rules for location of worship, but our Dharma also states that temple worship is one of the important aspects of our lives. Besides the prayers, the frequent social interaction among the worshipers help to keep our community strong. It helps us to have a collective vision about our world and unifies in our society. These gatherings in addition help us to instill our values within our children in a natural way. We are a part of the most affluent communities in the United States. We owe all of this to our hard work, the punya of our ancestors and to the blessing of Bhagwan Narayan. Coming from different regions in India, speaking different languages, and communicating in different accents, we have built the foundations of our temple. We have rested for 13 years, and now its time to begin the preparations for the completion of the Laxmi Narayan Temple.

So what's left?

Our goal is to give a chance to every individual, child and the family in our community to participate in purnaahuti for the Mandir Yagnya. In addition to your donations, we want every member of our community to take this task to heart and to really make this project a real success.

Our Building Committee has come up with some simple and elegant plans to complete our temple according to the instructions our temple architect, Mr. Patel. We need to raise three hundred and ten thousand dollars for this project. In addition, we currently have a budget of thirty-five thousand dollars per year to run.

Most of the funding for running expenses thus far comes from generous contributions from about 30-40 families. Currently, the Executive Committee scrapes every month to pay the bills. The committee has many plans for quality activities. We currently have 250 families in our community. We need to enlarge the financial base to include all the families for better services.

Become a due paying member of the Temple.

In India Hinduism is not structured and if you are born in a Hindu family you learn and practice Hinduism as a way of life. In the US the society is structured. The Hindu Temple is structured as a corporation. Increase of our membership and your participation helps strengthen our community and the Hindu Temple.

The temple helps us to reinforce our Hindu identity. It is in our own interest to become due paying member of the Hindu Temple. The time to apply for membership is in January. We request you to join the membership since the entire community benefits from the Temple. All of us in the community should participate in supporting and running it adequately.

I know of a lady who sends contributions to the Jewish Temple every month. She says the Temple needs regular help to run it. Christians donate 10% of their income for their church every month. It is called 'tithe'. We are adopting many new traditions in this land. Could we adopt this one too? When we conduct a personal pooja or attend any pooja at the Temple, we could give a generous dakshina to the Temple voluntarily and teach our children also to give. The Temple needs to be used more by all of us. We may be able to hold more family functions like samnskaras, marriage, birthdays and marriage anniversaries at the Temple.

Your Input needed-We are conducting the following poll to get your opinions for further improvements. Your help is needed to prepare the Hindu Temple for the next millennium.