news.bbc.co.uk

LONDON, UK, March 03, 2008: A young girl worshipped in Nepal as a living goddess has retired early from this ritual status.

Eleven-year-old Sajani Shakya is one of the three most revered living goddesses or Kumaris. She was in the news last when she was almost sacked from her position for travelling to the United States.

Sajani has been the Kumari of Bhaktapur city since she was two, but it has now emerged that she has left the post early, at the age of 11. Her father told the BBC however that this slightly early retirement had nothing to do her U.S travel controversy.

She has left the post because her family wanted her to undergo another religious ritual, a wedding, that most girls of her ethnic group experience in early childhood.

From Monday morning, an elaborate search will begin among Bhaktapur’s ancient streets and squares to find a new living goddess.

news.bbc.co.uk

KERALA, INDIA, February 27, 2008: Cloth infused with the herbs of traditional Indian medicine is becoming increasingly popular as the county’s stressed urban workers seek cures for conditions such as insomnia and eczema. Wearing a special shirt is claimed to cure itchy or sore skin, while sleepless nights can be taken care of by putting a herb-infused sheet over your mattress.

The herbs are selected according to the traditional Indian medicine known a ayurveda, with the infused cloth known as ayurvastra.

“We have selected 28 medicinal plants based on ayurvedic texts and theory–then we dip the natural cotton into it to make sleeping cloths,” the chief dyeing technician of the ayurvastra project, Rajan Kay said.

You can read the article here.

www.telegraph.co.uk

LONDON, UK, February 20, 2008: An American team has found that being unable to control anger can make you four times more likely to have a slow recovery, according to a study published in the journal Brain Behavior and Immunity.

To see if anger would hold back wound healing, the team conducted a study with 98 participants who had agreed to receive standardized blister wounds, inflicted by a vacuum pump on their non-dominant forearm.

Anger control was assessed using a standard scale.

“Not all participants responded in the same way to this standardized stressor. Those who had low anger control secreted more cortisol, associated with delayed healing,” says researcher Jean-Philippe Gouin. People with low control over the expression of their anger were 4.2 times more likely to take longer to heal, compared to those with higher levels of anger control.

The authors state that these stress-induced delays in healing could increase the susceptibility to infection at the wound site and result in longer hospital stays.

www.hinduismtoday.com

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