1. Even With Turmoil, Over 4 million Pilgrims Visit Vaishnovdevi
2. Hindu Temples Take Up new Community Role in Germany
3. The Nose, an Emotional Time Machine
4. Daily Inspiration

1. Even With Turmoil, Over 4 million Pilgrims Visit Vaishnovdevi

www.hinduonnet.com

JAMMU, INDIA, August 7, 2008: (PTI): A record number of 4.3 million pilgrims from across the country have visited the Mata Vaishnovdevi cave shrine since January this year, officials said here on Wednesday. While only 4 million devotees had visited the shrine during the corresponding period last year, registering an increase of 300.000 pilgrims, they said.

During the month of July, as many as 500.000 pilgrims paid their obeisance at the shrine despite disturbed conditions prevailing due to "Amarnath land row" in the region. On average, 15,000 devotees were daily reaching the base camp at Katra for their pilgrimage to the shrine, located in Trikuta hills in Reasi district.

Shri Mata Vaishnavdevi Shrine Board, along with local organizations, is organising elaborate security arrangements with the police department to ensure a safe journey for the pilgrims.

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2. Hindu Temples Take Up new Community Role in Germany

www.hinduismtoday.com

GERMANY, August 2, 2008: (Religion Watch Newsletter) Although the trend is not yet as developed as it has become in the US or UK, Hindu temples in Germany tend increasingly to play a role beyond providing rituals, especially in educating Hindu children born in the West and conveying to them Hindu traditions, writes German scholar Carina Back (Hanover University) in her book, "Hindu-Tempel in Deutschland".

While Indians in Germany have rarely attempted to open temples, Tamils who fled the conflict in Sri Lanka have been eager to establish their own places of worship, as have members of the (smaller) Hindu community from Afghanistan. Focusing on Tamil Hindu temples, Back remarks that, despite financial and other constraints, to a large extent they follow traditional Hindu teachings regarding the arrangement of temples. Opening places of worship has gone along with the creation of institutional structures necessary for organizing and maintaining the temples. Hindu traditions are kept as much as possible, but it is usually not possible to hold the full daily schedule of religious services.

Out of two dozen Tamil temples in Germany (the first one established in 1988), only one is purpose built (in Hamm, opened in 2002), while another one is under construction in Berlin; all the others have been installed in converted factories or warehouses, in flats or in basements. Consequently, many of them are still seen as temporary places, to be enlarged or replaced by new temples in the future. The author expects that future temples will align more closely with the traditional south Indian models; for the time being, financial considerations or zoning regulations have been preeminent in decisions such as the orientation of the temples and the choice of locations.

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3. The Nose, an Emotional Time Machine

www.nytimes.com

NEW YORK, USA, August 5, 2008: At the International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste held in San Francisco late last month, Dr. Herz and other researchers discussed the many ways our sense of smell stands alone.

On the one hand, said Jay A. Gottfried of Northwestern University, olfaction is our slow sense, for it depends on messages carried not at the speed of light or of sound, but at the far statelier pace of a bypassing breeze, a pocket of air enriched with the sort of small, volatile molecules that our nasal-based odor receptors can read. Yet olfaction is our quickest sense in evoking reactions. Whereas new signals detected by our eyes and our ears must first be assimilated by a structural way station called the thalamus before reaching the brain's interpretive regions, odiferous messages go through along dedicated pathways straight from the nose and right into the brain's olfactory cortex, for instant processing.

The olfactory cortex is embedded within the brain's limbic system and amygdala, where emotions are born and emotional memories stored. That's why smells, feelings and memories become so easily and intimately entangled, and why the simple act of washing dishes recently made Dr. Herz's cousin break down and cry. "The smell of the dish soap reminded her of her grandmother," said Dr. Herz, author of "The Scent of Desire."

Many mammals are clearly nosier than we. Consider that our olfactory epithelium, the yellowish mass of mucous membrane located some three inches up from our nostrils, holds about 20 million smell receptors designed to detect odor molecules. The nasal membranes of a bloodhound, by contrast, sustain an olfactory army 220 million receptors strong.

Numerous studies have shown that smell memory is long and resilient, and that the earliest odor associations we make often stick. "With a phone number, if you get a new one, a week later you may have forgotten the old one," Dr. Herz said. "With smells, it's the other way around. The first association is better than the second."

In another presentation, Maria Larsson, an associate professor of psychology at Stockholm University, described the power of smell to serve as an almost magical time machine, with potential for treating dementia, depression, the grim fog of age. Johan Willander and others in her lab have sought to give firm empirical foundation to the idea that smells and aromas, like the famed taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, can help disinter the past.

[HPI note: In ancient Yoga texts, Hindu wisdom long ago associated the sense of smell with memory and the Muladhara chakra.]

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4. Daily Inspiration

www.hinduismtoday.com

Fear less, hope more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; hate less, love more; and all good things are yours.
   Swedish proverb

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