{"id":13867,"date":"2014-11-04T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-11-04T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2014\/11\/04\/alagappa-alagappan-founder-of-the-flushing-ganesha-temple-passes-on-at-88\/"},"modified":"2014-11-04T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-11-04T12:00:00","slug":"alagappa-alagappan-founder-of-the-flushing-ganesha-temple-passes-on-at-88","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2014\/11\/04\/alagappa-alagappan-founder-of-the-flushing-ganesha-temple-passes-on-at-88\/","title":{"rendered":"Alagappa Alagappan, Founder of the Flushing Ganesha Temple, Passes on at 88"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/11\/02\/nyregion\/alagappa-alagappan-88-dies-founded-temples.html?hpw&#038;rref=obituaries&#038;action=click&#038;pgtype=Homepage&#038;module=well-region&#038;region=bottom-well&#038;WT.nav=bottom-well&#038;_r=0\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>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. <\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;the father of the temple-building movement in North America,&#8221; as a Hindu leader in Texas wrote in an email to Mr. Alagappan&#8217;s family.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>More at &#8216;source.&#8217;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source NEW YORK, NEW YORK, November 1, 2014 (New York Times): In 1968, on a trip to his native India,,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13867\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}