The begining

Since I am around for a long time in New York I have friends in all New york area puja committee. I usually visit all of them during Durga puja festival, specially if they are in different week ends. And I heard from all different groups the same comments like , we the Bengali of New York are here for a such a long time but we don't have a place of our own. 

During puja I specially like to come and spend time at Gujrati Samaj Puja in the morning when all the ladies helps the priest to make puja arrangement and cut fruits for the puja offering. Decoration team putting finishing touches of their decoration scheme. The place usually not very crowded at that time and all women talks about various subjects ranging from our community affairs, personal events, what going on in Kolkata, world news etc. One topic will always come someone will say, we have to have a place of our own, a temple a place where we can perform our rituals as per panjika etc. Then someone will float a rumor of Gujrati Samaj will not let us rent this place from next year or this building will be taken over by a Muslim organization very soon. Then they will look at us the men group having tea and adda in one corner and will say so many of you are here please do something. Men group will always agree with what ladies are saying, but usually this conversation ends soon and will resume again next year. I felt a sense of responsibility of doing something from this conversations. Also I had a dream of bringing all Bengali community together and have one puja. 

 In one of the meeting of Long Island Sorbajanin Durga Puja committee, few new members wanted to move the puja from VFW hall to a different location. Me and Sankar Bhoumik was given the responsibility to find a suitable new place. Sankar da and myself had big age difference we belong to almost two different generation. But we worked fine together to this common goal. I took Tanima and Sreemanta with me and started looking for a new place, we found few places and in next meeting we presented our findings, soon we realized the older generation members does not want to move the puja from VFW hall. They told us to find a place just to calm down the demands of younger generation of members. 

One day at a social gathering at Pronab Pal and Joyashree Pal's house, this topic came up and few people proposed what about finding a place to build a permanent temple for our community.They told me they are willing to commit financially if I work on this project .We got a paper and pen got every one's name and most of them pledged $2000 for this cause as seed money. Me and Sankarda, Sreemanta and Tanima got very excited. We started searching for place for our temple from next week. Each week end we used to go out ,at this time Dipak Nandi joined us, then Chandan Sinharoy also joined us, we started planning for fund raising. We called a meeting at "Tandoor restaurant" got few commitment. We got more excited. And after seeing many locations finally we liked a place in Baldwin.This was a old Italian restaurant .We liked it mostly for its decor, location and big parking area on the back and price. This time we got many new friends who liked to join us to make our dream a reality. One of them was Devdutta and Sharmista Misra, both of them were very dedicated person. One day we held a marathon calling of all the members of our community for fundraising drive from Debu's house with help of few volunteers. Each week end me, Sreemanta, Dipak and Chandan used to meet different place to discuss our strategy. Dipak was always very good in writing the plans. 

I created a power point presentation of our plan, borrowed a projector from our hospital and then started to do presentation at different gathering. We organized gatherings at VFW Hall, Gujarati Samaj Hall. Me and Srimanto went to Brooklyn to do a presentation at their puja. Pabitra Chowdhury helped us to have the presentation. I did many presentations at pujas in Gujrati Samaj. We got both encouragement and discouragements. I remember at one of our meeting at Gujrati Samaj one person from the audience came to stage and told us that we are taking a very dangerous step.This is going to be a sure failure and since we are handling people money we will end up in jail.We didn't know how to handle him finally Sugata Bagchi helped us to get this person out of the dias.

One day Basanti Mitra a very religious lady and a entrepreneur, invited us to her house to meet few people from the Ananda Mandir of New Jersey. She said we may benefit by talking to these people as we both have the same goal and they are ahead of us, by that time they have the building and land already, and we have only dream. Like any organization Ananda Mandir also going through up and down times. That time they were not doing good ,they were frustrated with the lack of empathy from the community. So they told us since you have not purchased a land yet ,you should think twice before making further progress. This is a very thankless job.

But our energy those days were so high we totally discarded their advice. We hold all our hand together around a table and Sankarda chanted a slokas - which means no matter what, since we took the pledge, we will go ahead with our project and with God willing we will be a sure success.