The Franklin Reporter & Advocate Eight Villages, One Community
A three-day festival – which will include the naming of a new main deity – is planned for later this month by the Srivari Sri Balaji Temple on Elizabeth Avenue.
The Grand Prana Pratishtapana festival, the first for this year-old Hindu temple, will be held outdoors on its 6-acre campus from May 27-29. The festival will be held from roughly 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.
The festival’s highlight will occur on May 29, when the Hindu Lord Balaji will be named the temple’s main deity in a special ceremony known as a pooja. Right now, that title belongs to their Lord Krishna – also known as Vishnu – a statue of which sits prominently on the 2,000-square-foot temple’s altar.
There is a small statute of Balaji placed to the right of Krishna in the temple. On May 29, that statue will be placed on a statue of the god Daruda – the eagle – and both will be carried to a tent for the pooja.
The current prayer/meditation building is actually the group’s temporary temple, said Vijayaraghavan Poondi, chairman of the temple’s board of trustees. Plans are to build a 3,000-square-foot temple on land behind the temporary building. Poondi said he did not know when that would occur.
There’s another, larger, representation of Balaji in the temple, carved in India out of one piece of stone. That statue won’t be set upright until the new temple is built and a pooja is held for it, Poondi said.
