[HinduThought] Alfred Ford: the billionaire bhakt

[Guest guest]

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 – 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