Shivani Patel, 24, decided to give up her corporate job at L’Oréal last December.

“I wanted to do something that was a little bit bigger than myself,” said Patel, who graduated in 2020 from Rutgers with degrees in supply chain management and marketing.

Her next role, which started in February, was unpaid: She spent months helping build what is billed as the largest Hindu temple in the U.S. The BAPS Akshardham is a soaring stone structure now looming over former soy fields in Robbinsville, in central New Jersey.

Temple officials say as many as 12,500 volunteers, most of them from the U.S., Canada and India, contributed to the eight-year building project, spread across a nearly 200-acre property. They contend the work, started in 2015, is a testament to the faith of what is called the Swaminarayan community, whose roots trace back to western India in the early 1800s.

[The controversy associated with the project is not what you think it would normally be. ~ Beege]