VAL MORIN, CANADA, July 23, 2006: Nestled in this small Laurentian community is a world-renowned Murugan Temple. Founded in 1963 by Swami Vishnu Devananda, Sivananda Ashram and Subramanyam Aayapa Temple, has become a pilgrimage place where Hindu devotees come to practice yoga, meditate or pray. For two weeks every summer, the Subramanyam Aayapa temple attracts thousands of devotees from Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto and from as far as Western Canada, the United States and Europe. They’re here for the annual kavadi ceremony, the largest Hindu festival in North America. This year’s festivities culminated with an elaborate parade with 30,000 people expected to participate. Hindus, many from the Sri Lankan diaspora, come to worship Lord Muruga. For many devotees, the temple is a place where they can practice just as they did in Sri Lanka, Mauritius or India. Ravi Arulampalam, of Montreal, comes to the temple with his wife and two sons about four times a year. To Arulampalam, who fled sectarian violence in his native Sri Lanka in the 1980s, the ceremony is about devotion, not just to God but to his culture. “Religion focuses people for the good way – it’s for parents to show their kids,” he said on a recent afternoon as his extended family began their puja feast next to a smouldering fire outside the temple. Drawing his two sons, Janith, 13, and Janarth, 11, closer to him, Arulampalam says, “This is what I love about Canada, that we can have our culture here and all the freedom.”
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