Prabhupada had asked the Indian high commis- sioner for the United Kingdom to petition Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to attend ISKCON’s upcoming cornerstone-laying ceremony in Mayapur. Already Prabhupada had instructed all his G.B.C. secretaries to attend the ceremony, and he had asked the devotees to invite many prominent citizens of Calcutta. Writing to his disciples in India, he said that if they could not get IndiraGandhi to come, they should at least get the governor of Bengal, Sri S. S. Dhavan. Prabhupada was meeting in London with several of his disciples experienced in architecture and design; he wanted them to draft plans for his Mayapur project. Nara-Narayana had built Ratha-yatra carts and designed temple interiors, Ranacora had studied architecture, and Bhavananda had been a professional designer, but Prabhupda himself conceived the plans for the Mayapur buildings. He then told his three-man committee to provide sketches and an architect’s model; he would immediately begin raising funds and securing support in India for the project. To the devotees who heard Prabhupada’s plans, this seemed the most ambitious ISKCON project ever. While taking his morning walks in Russell Square, Prabhupada would point to various buildings and ask how high they were. Finally he announced one morning that the main temple in Mayapur should be more than three hundred feet high! Mayapur’s monsoon floods and sandy soil would create unique difficulties, he said, and the building would have to be built on a special foundation, a sort of floating raft. A civil engineer later confirmed this.
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