ExpertDabbler

Have you ever been to Sri puram, India’s second golden temple? Now, please let us let’s brush aside relevant pointers like the need for golden temples considering the number of malnourished children in India, the very Indian obsession with gold, etc. My mom was very keen to see this ‘thanga kovil’- she was under immense pressure from relatives who had traveled all the way from down south and managed to visit. I suspect she had endured the ‘Ennadhu madras la irundhuttu innum parkalaiya?’ dialogue more than she liked. Yesterday we decided to put those questions to rest and off we went to Sri puram. It was an interesting experience though this again reinforced some of my beliefs on temples.

First the positives, to conceive a project of such scale, persuade investors/donors to part with their hard earned money, mobilize human resources to execute the plan, and put in place systems and processes for operations and maintenance on a daily basis requires tremendous, I repeat, tremendous organizational skills and enterprise. I am sure those behind the project have that ability in abundance. This project has pushed Vellore into the limelight. I guess lot many families are making a living out of this enterprise. I’ll bet Vellore’s GDP, inflation, real estate prices, black money and all such things would’ve gone way up ever since this project became operational.

If you noticed, the above paragraph might have looked like a straight lift out of a Forbes cover story on Ratan Tata’s dream car project. But that was intentional. The reason being that was the way I saw this whole thing. Setting up a venture of such scale deserves respect, but that’s just about it. To me, Sri Puram is more like a corporate, five star-ish theme park leveraging the Hindu form of worship than a temple. What I find even more curious is the predictability in which such religious theme parks have spring up in our country in the recent past. This increasingly looks like a model which will never fail in India : Build a crazily fantastic structure on an insanely huge budget, fix an object of worship inside, a person is made the architect of all this endeavor, the person becomes a god-man, unleash media hype, and lo, you have an institution which would take on an MNC in terms of organization strength, and revenue flow.

‘Amma’ is the celebrity here. ‘Amma’ is smiling in giant posters with hands raised as a way of blessing the masses from all possible directions inside the premises (360 deg. Blessing). ‘Amma’ runs schools, hospitals, anna dhaana schemes; I suspect ‘Amma’ will soon start engineering, medical and dental colleges, maybe a B school later on , and then integrate it all under, ‘Narayani’ University, will go on to plant thousands of trees, will meet CM/Deputy CM on a regular basis and so on. In India, its amazing that in some ways, the more we change, the more we stay the same.

‘Old is the real gold when it comes to temples’ is my take; And the less corporatization and the institutionalization of Hindu religion the better. I wish I’d taken my mom to the magnificent Thiruvanamalai which she is yet to see. One glad thing was that even mom is with me on this assessment. ‘Ellam paisa dhaan…’ was her assessment when we were made to walk into several stores which sell everything from gold coins to silk sarees for Narayani when ones own bags and cell phones are required to be deposited outside.

Sri Puram is an outing spot for the rich and affluent with religious pretensions.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 13th, 2009 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.