Full Audio: 1 Hour, 10 Minutes
(written for
Vishwa Sandesh)
Swami Atmananda Giri In Town
By Paramendra Bhagat (www.paramendra.com)
On the evening of October 17 I found myself at the offices of Girija Gautam at 72-28 Broadway Third Floor. It is the best office of all I have been to in the area and a big reason why is the large window through which you can see pretty much all of Jackson Heights. You should check it out when you get a chance.
He took me to the Geeta Temple on Corona Avenue. I had been to the temple once before to step inside, and several times to play Ingress: the location is a portal in the game. He also
switched his electric account for the office, gas to follow shortly: I am a network marketer with ACN. If he were to only grab half the people he had show up for his daughter’s grand high school graduation party a few months back, he would hit the top position in
the business and be looking at making 100K a month at least, I said to him. But he said time was an issue, and instead he would be happy to share all his contacts with me. Why, thank you. I guess a Columbia Law grad needs to focus on his law practice. This guy could easily be holding public office in Nepal, that part of him comes out in his immense community involvements.
I was born a Hindu, my family is still Hindu, and I have not stopped celebrating any of the festivals.
They say about the Dalai Lama that he has something akin to a PhD in whatever it is that he has accumulated in terms of Buddhist teachings. This guru is also a Vedantic scholar with immense credentials. He was just one step below the Shankaracharya. Enough said. There are the rituals of Dashain, and then there is the prabachan. The wise man speaks, and you sit and listen. The guru had a sense of humor. He spent a few minutes explaining the word “makkhichoos.” I already knew, but thanks for the refresher.
When I got back home I prepared a multimedia presentation of the evening at my Nepal blog that you can find at http://bit.ly/16gPQBs where I have pictures, audio and video files. And I sent it out to my NYC Nepali Google Group with close to 600 members and the Facebook group of the same name with close to 200 members. The guru was just getting started, he was to speak every evening until the 25th.
There is a NRN angle to the swami that was of great interest to me. The bridhashram that the association built in Devghat was done so under this swami’s supervision. The swami also used his immense Bombay connections to set up a fund. Hundreds of people eat for free every day at the premises. This is what Bush might call a sound faith based initiative. You can be secular as a clock and still admire the implementation of the whole operation.
The first evening’s prabachan was on Geeta, easily the crown jewel of the Hindu teachings. What Muna Madan is to Laxmi Devkota’s body of work, what the life of Jesus is in the Bible, Geeta is to volumes upon volumes of Hindu messages. You can meet Nepalis at political and social events, but at an event like this, the connection you form is deeper.
There was prasad after the prabachan. The Gurudwara on 61st and Broadway beats all religious establishments in the area on that count: there is lunch and dinner every day pretty much. My childhood best friend’s wife is a Punjabi he met at engineering college in India: they live in Augusta, Georgia. He is a diversity visa lottery winner. When I was in Indiana, I drove to visit him. My first day of Dashain was dinner at the Divya Dham mandir. Many Nepalis had gathered. That was the first time Girijaji mentioned the swami to me.
He mentioned Hindu rituals and his kids. A guy from Nepal raising a family in America at some level feels the need to keep to his roots. Can’t blame him. On the drive back from the temple, he called up Bhim’s Café and ordered momo for his son. That might not be religious, but that is also a ritual, and it is also to do with roots. Eating momo is the top thing I might have learned in the decade plus I spent in Kathmandu. The dish is a delight.
Girijaji was in Tennessee for a while. I was in Kentucky for five and a half years: that is where I went to college. The first time I got to meet him was at the NRN membership drive event in Times Square a few years back when my friends Temba Sherpa and Jiwan Shrestha brought the association 1,000 members in one month compared to the 400 members the organization had collected in four years. I got John Liu to show up as Chief Guest. Harlem’s State Senator Bill Perkins, the first elected official in the city to come out for Obama, was the original invite. But then he was stuck in Albany Friday night, which is when the gay marriage bill passed. A John Liu staffer texted me late Friday night. Perkins is stuck in Albany, do you want John Liu to show up instead? We moved from texting to the phone. By midnight the confirmation had been made. Liu showed up promptly at 10 AM the following day. The guy at the time was the leading candidate for Mayor.
