CityView Magazine

August/September 2010

CityView Magazine - Fayetteville, NC

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A temple, together For years, Fayetteville has had a vibrant and burgeoning Indian community. The Southeastern North Carolina Asian Indian Association holds the annual India Festival every April, donating proceeds to charity, about $80,000 in giving over the past five years. Then there is the India Foundation, a non-profit organization performing community outreach in addition to lessons in classical Indian dance both in Fayetteville and Cary. But for the first time, the community truly has a home base here, a new $2 million temple in the Cedar Creek community that brings people of different Hindu traditions together. The 10,000-square-foot Hindu Bhavan has classrooms and a large room for worship services. It is expected to serve about 150 Indian families, not just from Fayetteville but Lumberton, too. “This has been a project in the making for a long time,” said Dr. Sumedha Dalvi. For the past 10 years of planning, families have worshipped in Raleigh, making the long commute for services and special events. Now, they can hold services right here, also opening the building for public gatherings and celebrations. 60 | Aug/Sept • 2010 daily worship, it remains firmly entrenched in Hindu religion and philosophy. Each flick of the wrist, arc of the arms, even precise eyeball movement, means something different – the smallest of movements can tell an entire story about the rich mythology of Hinduism. In the classical dances of India, there is more to master than steps and rhythm. The effect is one of intricate full-body motion with fingers, eyes, neck and limbs moving in opposite directions in time with the music. It means sacrifice – Sita knows, perhaps better than anyone. “It was a fun journey,” Sita said this summer, after it was all over, “but it was a journey.” She has been dancing since she was 8 but in the past year, the work intensified with rehearsals three times a week for two and three hours at a time. No family vacations, just school and straight to rehearsal, sometimes in Raleigh, returning to Fayetteville late at night to finish her homework. Sita is the daughter of Drs. Kalpana Krishna and Dinesh Chandra, husband-and-wife physicians. Krishna herself studied the Bharata Natyam as a girl but never performed her arangetram, medical school coming first. But she continued to take lessons even after Sita started to learn herself. For many students, the dance isn’t something to be studied for a few years and then forgotten – it’s a lifetime devotion to a way of life and a guru who guides you. For Sita and two dozen other Fayetteville girls who began taking dance lessons together as small children, that guru was one woman. The diminutive and soft-spoken Asha Bala shepherded them through the tears, frustration, laughter and hard work, eight of them going on to perform their arangetram, six in the past nine months alone. Bala is a well-respected dancer in her own right who established her own school of dance in her native India. Bala had a career, multiple degrees and a busy life as a mother and wife who traveled all over Europe with her family. Even so, her love for the art form led her to American University in Georgetown where she studied American modern dance. Her husband was in India, their grown daughter in the United Kingdom and there was Bala in a rented apartment in a strange country. And then she took it one step further, applying for a job in North Carolina. And that’s how Krishna, an Indian mother in Fayetteville looking for a place where her daughter could learn an ancient dance form that would connect an old home to a new one, found Bala at E.E. Smith High School. Bala took those small girls and taught them respect and humility for the dance, the tradition, the way of life. “It’s a worship,” she says. “You have to let go of yourself and give yourself completely to the dance. It’s so much bigger than all of us. A lifetime is not enough.”CV

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