photo of Alfred Ford: the billionaire bhakt

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http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/photo.cms?msid=1042369

 

vediculture, "vrnparker" <vrnparker> wrote:

>

> Alfred Ford: The billionaire bhakt

> MALAVIKA SANGGHVI

>

> TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ SUNDAY, MARCH 06, 2005 11:32:38 AM ]

>

> The Ford legacy doesn't really weigh him down as he can see beyond

> material trappings. In fact, he has found his religion, his God, his

> very reason to be. Alfred B Ford , the great grandson of the legendary

> Henry Ford, in an exclusive interview.

>

> He was born into one of America's richest families, the great grandson

> of Henry Ford, the tycoon who gave the world the motorcar and the

> assembly line.

>

> "I had a normal upbringing," Alfred B Ford says, "My parents lived

> simply." But behind that statement lies generations of staggering

> wealth and privilege - mothers who collected Renoirs and Van Goghs,

> jet-setting aunts who married Greek shipping tycoons, Sunday school

> and baseball games, and the great tumult of the '60s.

>

> By the time he got to college, he was somewhat of an

> anti-establishment person. "The Vietnam War had started, it was the

> era of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, we had a Presidential

> assassination, and we had his brother and Martin Luther King

> assassinated."

>

> Says Ford, "We began to experiment and look at different ways of

> living. I wanted to know what God looked like. I was looking for a

> personal connection with God, a relationship with him."

>

> Though it seemed to be a '60s kind of thing to do, in families such as

> his, it was nothing new to search for higher meaning. "My great

> grandfather Henry Ford," he says, "had always wondered how he had

> acquired the ability to know so much about mechanics. He had very

> little formal training, and yet, at the age of nine he could take a

> watch apart and put it back together. One explanation was that he had

> acquired this in some other lifetime. Though not very religious, he

> was very interested in spirituality. He believed in reincarnation. A

> Sufi mystic came to visit him from India, and he was pretty much of a

> vegetarian."

>

> Blame it on the Beatles â€" George Harrison actually. "Everything Indian

> was very popular back in those days," he recalls, "I remember, in my

> college I had a big picture of a mandala and we used to try and

> meditate in front of it. I had my hair long and a beard, and then

> George Harrison, who had become involved in the Krishna Consciousness,

> produced an album for the 'Radhe Krishna temple', which I bought when

> I was in college."

>

> It was a life-defining moment. As soon as the first bhajan began, he

> says, he found himself crying. "It touched something very very deep in

> my heart. It was a very profound experience. I realised that this was

> the concept of God I was looking for - Govinda, the most attractive...

> the protector of cows... the most beautiful... always youthful... eyes

> like blooming lotus flowers..."

>

> After college, Ford wanted to become a recluse, so he moved to the

> Rocky Mountains in Wyoming, where he lived in a little cabin, and

> skied every day. But Krishna came looking for him in the form of a

> close friend who had been a hippy along with him in college, and who

> had become an initiated disciple in the Krishna Consciousness

> movement.

>

> "He came over with some books, and preached to me," he says. "He had

> brought me Prabhupad's translation of the Bhagvad Gita , and soon, I

> started to change my lifestyle. I had turned vegetarian in college and

> I had stopped drinking, and then I started cooking vegetarian food and

> offering it to Krishna as prasadam . I started chanting on my japa

> mala and studying Prabhupad's books."

>

> Soon a guru-disciple relationship began to develop between the

> 20-something heir to one of America's biggest fortunes, and the

> 80-something pontiff of one of Hinduism's largest movements. To please

> his guru, he bought a $ 6,00,000 mansion in Honolulu to house a temple

> and learning centre.

>

> Finally, they met. "I was very nervous as I knew this was a great

> personality. So, I bowed to him and as I was coming up, he said to me,

> 'So you are Henry Ford's great grandson. Where is he now?'

>

> "And that question immediately made me realise that life is so

> temporary. Krishna Consciousness teaches you that the only eternal

> relationship and identity you have is with Krishna. I learnt when I

> was growing up that though I belonged to a family which had

> everything, still, there was unhappiness and frustration," says the

> man, who has come as close as any to having it all materially.

>

> But soon, there was trouble in paradise. "People definitely thought I

> had joined a cult," he says, "but it did not bother me, in the least.

> I was happy." And soon his family came round. "I helped set up a

> centre in Detroit in 1983. And for the opening, my parents came, they

> saw Radha Krishna, the deities there, they took prasadam ."

>

> Perhaps their feelings were assuaged because they realised that he was

> not about to abdicate his responsibilities. He still attended to the

> family business and had made quite a reputation for himself as one of

> the foremost dealers of Indian art.

>

> "I used to come to India and buy art from the Maharajahs," he says,

> "In those days, we were allowed to take antiques out of the country."

>

> With so much India on his mind and on his sleeve, you didn't need an

> astrologer to predict the next step: he married an Indian girl. A

> Sharmilla Bhattacharya, PhD, from Bengal via Jaipur and Australia.

>

> "In the early '80s, I became friends with one of the Hare Krishna

> leaders in Australia. There was this beautiful, brilliant Bengali

> girl, a devotee who was being married off to a doctor against her

> wishes, and her spiritual guru was worrying about her. Why don't I

> marry her, I found myself saying."

>

> You can bet Krishna smiled. They were married in less than a year, and

> by the time she got her degree, they were already the proud parents of

> an American-Bengali-Brahmin-Wasp girl by the name of Amrita!

>

> Life, more or less, settled into a routine now. There was the

> chanting, the worship at the temple that began at 4 am and lasted till

> about 9 am, and then there was office to attend to, where he worked as

> a trustee of the Ford Motor Company Fund, in charge of the company's

> charitable work, oversaw an IT company that he had invested into in

> California, and other investments to attend to.

>

> "All this was pure business," he says. "Krishna's message to Arjuna

> was not to give up his position as a warrior and go meditate in the

> woods, but to fulfil his purpose here in the material world. Go ahead

> and achieve what you have to, be the best of what you can be, but at

> the same time, don't neglect your spiritual life," he says simply.

>

> He's ruffled a few feathers with his passion for setting up Krishna

> Consciousness centres all over the world. In Russia, the Orthodox

> Church saw red when he wanted to build a domed building large enough

> to hold 8,000 Hindus, a few miles from the Red Square.

>

> Now, he's going to play footsie with the Indian government over a $250

> million ski resort he wants to start in Himachal Pradesh. But for him,

> it's all par for the course. Business and spirituality are not strange

> bedfellows.

>

> "My cousin Bill is more or less vegetarian, eats no red meat, just a

> little bit of fish, is a Buddhist, studies Eastern religions and is

> chairman of the Ford Motor Company," he says, "I send him books on

> Krishna Consciousness."

>

> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1042366,curpg-2.cms

>

> Bengal CM slights Ford, Vedic village goes to MP

>

> Buddha has been refusing meetings since last year, sanction for 400

> acres

>

> NANDINI GUHA

>

> Posted online: Saturday, March 05, 2005 at 0211 hours IST

>

> KOLKATA, MARCH 4: With help from Bengal nowhere in sight, Alfred Ford

> has decided to shift his Vedic village to Madhya Pradesh. What Mayapur

> will be left with is a downscaled version of the proposed Rs 600-cr

> project.

>

> Ford had been camping in Kolkata over the past few days but Writers'

> Buildings repeatedly turned down requests for a meeting. With Chief

> Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya refusing to meet him yet again this

> week, Ford decided to do without government ''involvement'' and go

> ahead with a Vedic village on a very small scale at Mayapur. ''The

> Chief Minister is just not interested. All we had asked the government

> to do is sanction 400 acres. That has not happened in two years. We

> will start with, maybe, 25 acres on our own,'' Ford's representative

> in India, Sudipto Mukherjee, told The Indian Express.

>

> Ford, who is in Mayapur at the moment, will stop over in Kolkata on

> Saturday to catch a flight to the US. Mukherjee said Ford had held

> successful meetings with Himachal Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh and

> would build a ski village there.

>

> And, what Bengal lost in terms of investment, will go to Madhya

> Pradesh. Former CM Uma Bharati had bagged a Rs 300-crore tourism

> project from Ford, the second largest in the country after Mayapur.

>

> Bhattacharya, on the other hand, had refused Ford audience even last

> year when he was here to commit investment worth Rs 600 crore. ''In

> fact, the Madhya Pradesh government is offering us free land for this

> project,'' Bhakticharan Swami, a member of ISKCON in charge of the

> project, said. The MP government and ISKCON have already identified a

> plot in Ujjain, on the banks of the Narmada.

>

> Industries Minister Nirupam Sen said he was ''not aware'' of Ford

> being turned away. ''I don't think they had approached our department;

> we have always welcomed investment with open arms,'' Sen added.

>

> http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=65872

> --- End forwarded message ---