Hare Krishna’s Home

from the magazine of La Repubblica (Venerdì). Image Source TOVP Jay and Vijay archive

For five centuries, St. Peter’s Basilica was the largest religious building in the world. A primacy that will soon lose, at least on the surface. To overcome it, the new temple of the Hare Krishna religion which stands out in Mayapur, on the banks of the river Ganges, a three-hour drive from Calcutta, eight in times of traffic. The only road leading to Mayapur is among the most tortuous and dangerous on the subcontinent. Crossroads without signs follow one another, from which animals and vehicles of all sizes and dimensions suddenly appear.

It took Rome 120 years and twenty popes to finish the work on St. Peter’s. The brilliant minds of Donato Bramante, Michelangelo, Giacomo della Porta, Bernini worked there, just to name a few. In Mayapur, India, the Hare Krishnas built their headquarters in a relatively short time: from 2009 to 2022, the year in which the last tranche will be inaugurated.

The great river that flows less than a kilometer away remains a special observation. Its floods are periodic, sometimes devastating. «The road leading to Mayapur will be widened with the help of the Indian government – assures Saul Porecki (Sunanda das), spokesman for the new temple project -. We can’t do much about flooding, but we have underground water systems to keep the water away from the foundations”

In the center the imposing turquoise-colored dome: the Indian equivalent of the Roman dome. The heart and engine of the project is Alfred Ford (Ambarisha das), great-grandson of Henry Ford, the inventor of the assembly line and of the homonymous car giant. Alfred, 70 years old, married, two daughters, donated 30 million dollars for the construction of Mayapur. Another 30 were provided by Iskcon, the company with which the Hare Krishna religion is registered.

The remaining 40 planned to close the Ford yards are collecting them around the globe. Indeed, who better than him can boast good contacts with wealthy industrialists and crowned heads. He lives in Florida, but spends several months a year in India where he supervises the work of a thousand architects, sculptors and masons working with reinforced concrete and marble from Vietnam. His day begins at 4.30, as with any devoted practitioner. He always carries with him a rosary made of 108 wooden beads, recited in prayer 16 times a day. He strictly vegetarian diet, no coffee, much less cigarettes and alcohol. When, back in 1975, his parents learned from a newspaper that he had joined an unspecified sect that would surely have stolen his 1.2 billion share of the inheritance, his sister fell ill. But then she recovered. A legacy of that size did not happen. Alfred never even shaved his head, as befits the classic Hare Krishna monk. “I have one foot in religion and the other outside,” he said, but it is easy to meet him in cassock.