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 – 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