iNDICA NEWS BUREAU-
Diwali festivities were extra special this year for residents of North Carolina as a new 87-foot tower was inaugurated by Governor Roy Cooper in the presence of hundreds of devotees at the Sri Venkateswara Temple in Cary.
The tower, which is called the “Tower of Unity and Prosperity”, has been constructed 13 years after work to build the temple started in 2009. According to the temple leaders, this tower is now the tallest of its kind in North America.
“What a wonderful day this is, especially in times of trouble. Walking into this temple with reverence and leaving your worries outside for just a while, that’s something we all need to do, but then we can always leave the temple with even more determination than ever to address those worries and to make sure we’re doing something about it,” Governor Cooper said addressing the community, CBS17 reported.
The temple in Cary has been modeled after the famous Sri Venkateswara Temple in Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, and is known to be the largest Hindu temple in North America. In 2019 approval for the tower had been granted and construction began a year later in April 2020. At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, said Lakshminarayanan Srinivasan, general secretary of the temple’s board of trustees.
Srinivasan added that the “donate a brick” program, which invited Indian Americans from across the country to donate whatever they could to help see through the tower’s completion, generated around $2.5 million from more than 5,000 donors.
There are additional plans for expansion, Srinivasan said, including an assembly hall that would be built next to the temple. He revealed that there are plans to build fountains and a “manicured landscape” to surround the temple.
Construction of the Sri Venkateswara Temple in Cary started after there was felt a palpable and growing demand in 1988 among Indians living in the Triangle area of North Carolina. The expansion of the temple comes at a time when the Indian population in the Triangle area, also known as Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, is growing.
According to Indian American Impact, Indian Americans are the largest ethnic group in the 425,000-strong populace of Asian Americans that lives in North Carolina. According to 2021 census estimates, over 51,000 Indian Americans lived in Wake County in North Carolina, and 57,000 in Wake, Durham and Orange counties combined.
The Indian Americans wanted the grandeur and minutely detailed artwork of South Indian
temples reproduced in the US. Fourteen artisans were brought in from India to hand-carve the temple’s decorative Hindu idols out of cement.
