NEW YORK, NEW YORK, November 1, 2014 (New York Times): In 1968, on a trip to his native India, Alagappa Alagappan dreamed that an ancient Hindu God told him to visit a medium. So he did, and on his first visit the medium read palm leaves to tell him that Lord Ganesha wanted to settle in a city beginning with the letter N.
By the time of his death, on Oct. 24 at the age of 88, Mr. Alagappan, a retired United Nations official who lived in Queens, had become “the father of the temple-building movement in North America,” as a Hindu leader in Texas wrote in an email to Mr. Alagappan’s family.
Mr. Alagappan started the project close to home, in his adopted city whose name began with N [New York]. Mr. Alagappan helped form the Hindu Temple Society of North America, which in 1977 opened a temple in Flushing, Queens (a borough of New York City). Today there are 700 Hindu temples in the United States, serving a Hindu population that since 1965 has increased thirtyfold, to about 1.5 million.
HPI Note: Our founder, Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, knew Alagappan and was a strong supporter of Flushing Ganesha temple in its early years, encouraging him to set an example of traditional orthodox worship for future Hindu temples in the US.
More at ‘source.’