Why election based representation from the ‘district’ in which the temple is situated might be a result of misplaced understanding

Historical research and analysis around the temples and their resources have been centred around how they acted as focal points of social control, how they were managed by a limited number of people belonging to select communities who had a vested interest in keeping the temple resources to themselves. Sri Parthasarthy Temple, Triplicaine has been a fundamental example of how the temple management was already composed of local communities who were devotees of the temple and also of how it was interwoven across the societal matrix blending together various sections of the society which had in common the noble pursuit of running the temples in the best way as possible. Thus proving that traditional temple management already had a highly evolved mechanism, a broken down and simplistic version of what is now being proposed as a common universal template across the various temple administrations. Proposing election based representation from the “district” in which the temple is situated often misses the point that each temple evolved its own unique methodology to integrate the local communities into how it was run and the resources managed. While the need of the hour is a reform focused on the revival of traditional temple governance which was founded on Dharma, the distracted lot demand an infusion of secular ethos into how the temples are run so as to serve the purposes of a political-administrative system that has existed in barely a tenth of the time period in which these temples and their enduring institutions have existed, like rocks tethering us to our cultures and most importantly to our Dharma.