At the L-junction of two main roads, the land slopes away into sand, rubble and shrubbery, and as you descend into it from what seems to be a rough rural track on one side or down rude steps on the other, you seem to be entering a little bit of open space in a back-of-beyond Tamil village. But as you begin wondering if this is Johor Bahru (JB) thinking of 2020, you are dazzled by a blaze of multi-colour lighting. And you realise you are at the ‘Glass Temple’, the glitter and the colour coming from light reflecting from 500,000 pieces of coloured glass and scores of crystal chandeliers. Soon, you learn that all this is one man’s commitment to draw people to the divine.
That man was born in JB as Sinnathamby, the son of the chairman of the committee that supervised the Arulmigu Sri Raja Kaliamman temple, then little more of a hut raised in a clearing and housing an icon of Goddess Kali.
The playful teenager that Sinnathamby was saw the light as a 16-year-old in 1983, during the annual Chitra Pournami Kavadi Festival, and began to devote himself to Kali Amman. After college, he became a teacher and an athletics coach, but he also began to spend time on a door-to-door donation drive to collect funds to make Mother Kali’s hut a temple. On August 25, 1966, the temple, now a solid structure with a handsome raja gopuram , was consecrated.
Once the temple was completed, Sinnathamby began to get involved in poojas , preach on divinity and address youth on the necessity for discipline and treading a moral path. He was on his way to becoming Guru Bhagawan Sittar who urged, “Do give like Karna, do serve like Krishna; you can’t avoid karma, so do some dharma.”
When he was planning for the second kumbhabishekam , the Guru visited Bangkok. And during an auto ride there, he noticed a glittering light in the distance. The driver told him it belonged to a Buddhist temple. And off they went there to find it was the glass embellishments at the entrance that had caught the Guru’s attention a mile away. Inspired by this, he decided to transform the temple in JB with glass. Work on it was started in 2007 and completed in 2009.
Kali Amman may be the presiding deity here, but other gods and goddesses of the pantheon have their niches on one side of the praharam . On the other side, five on each corridor, are gurus and saints and religious icons of other faiths, standing testimony to the Guru’s belief that ‘God is one’. Lord Buddha, Jesus, Guru Nanak and Mother Teresa are some of these creations in Rajasthan marble. Also on the outer walls are friezes of glass panels in the six colours used in embellishing the temple – red, blue, green, yellow, purple, and white. The symbols and designs of these panels are the work of the Guru.
As a ‘glass temple’, an air-conditioned one at that, this is one of a kind. One that will draw visitors due to its uniqueness. But to Guru Bhagawan Sittar, it is a ‘Holy Place’, where all who pray are blessed by the Divine Mother Kali and are the better for it.
