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Reprinted with permission from the Post-Bulletin, Rochester, Minnesota, August 31, 2004

Rochester's Indian-American community will open a religious and cultural center to expose its young generation to India's culture and heritage.

Being established by Hindu Samaj Temple of Minnesota, a nonprofit organization, with funding support from the community, the center will be in a church building it plans to acquire soon at 911 11th Ave. N.W.

"Next month, we would finalize the $240,000 deal to buy the old church space, and the proposed center would be functional by November," said Suresh Kotagal of Rochester, an officer with the organization.

"The money we have raised so far through voluntary contributions is sufficient to make the mortgage down payment," said Kotagal, a professor in pediatrics at Mayo Clinic. "But the challenge is to sustain the donations on a long-term basis for paying up the mortgage money."

One way the organization is exploring to raise money is to follow a "church model," whereby Indians would volunteer to pay part of their income to the fund.

Rochester has about 300 Indian families of mostly Hindu, Christian and Sikh faiths. Most are first generation immigrants who came here for jobs or business opportunities. Most are employed by Mayo Clinic and IBM.

IBM began attracting the information technology professionals in the 1990s as part of its tie with India's leading information technology company, Tata Consultancy Service.

"As a world-famed center of excellence, Mayo Clinic has been a magnet for the Indian doctors," said Prathibha Varkey, an assistant professor of medicine at Mayo.

Rochester's first settlers from India were from the entrepreneurial Gujarati Patel community, hailing from the Indian state of Gujarat, who got into the motel business in Minnesota. The Patels now form a sizable chunk of the Indian-American population in Rochester and have been running a cricket club, two Indian restaurants and a couple of stores.

The closely-knit Indian community plans to use the multi-faith center to expose their America-born children to the religious and cultural values of India. Indian immigrants also want to define their identity in the American milieu.

The center, said Luna Mukerjee, a research scholar at Mayo Clinic, would be a secular platform and would forge a synthesis of Indian religious and cultural values.

"You can be rooted in the Indian values and yet be a proud American," she said.

Although Rochester's Indian community has been organizing get-togethers on important religious festivals — the Diwali festival last year attracted 500 people — the need for a religious-cultural institution has long been felt.

"The center will have a temple and also run classes for those keen to learn Indian languages and dances," said Kotagal, who helped establish a similar center in St. Louis before he moved to Rochester five years ago. "We don't mind amalgamating with the American culture, but surely expect our children to stay rooted in the Indian values."

"The Indian heritage is so rich and has so much to offer," said K. Sreekumaran Nair, a senior professor at Mayo Clinic. "The best thing about the American culture is that it encourages diversity."

(Vinayak, a special correspondent and bureau chief for India Today, was in Rochester last week on a World Press Institute fellowship. He participated in a Wednesday public meeting sponsored by the Post-Bulletin.)