indiapost.com

NEW YORK, May 31, 2008: The Staten Island Hindu temple celebrated the Prana Pratistha, a ceremony during which the consecration of the Hindu deities Sri Shiva and Parvati, Sri Karthikeya, Durga Mata, Lakshmi Mata, Saraswati Mata, Sri Radha Krishna and Sri Hanumanji at the temple in a three-day ceremony, from May 23 to 25. This marks the third stage completion of this temple dedicated to Sri Rama, with other important Hindu deities.

This is the only temple dedicated to the deity Shree Rama in the tri-state. The temple is the dream of the small Hindu Community of Staten Island who put in the effort to make it possible.

howrah.org

LUCKNOW, INDIA, May 22, 2008: Sadhus, saints and religious leaders in Varanasi will embark on a new mission from next week. These religious leaders will perform shramdan (voluntary labour) to clean up the Ganga river in the holy city. Led by Swami Avimukteshwaranand, a representative of Shankaracharya of Jyotis and Sharda-Dwarka Peeth Swami and Swarupanand Saraswati, they will start offering shramdan in Varanasi from May 26.

“The state of the Ganga in Varanasi is bad enough to make one cry. The size of the river has been reduced to half and the pollution is almost nauseating. The Ganga is the holiest of all rivers in the world and people come to Varanasi for a holy dip because they believe that the waters of Ganga can wash away their sin and lead them to salvation. We have waited all these years for the government to do something about the pollution in the Ganga but now we will do it ourselves,” says Mahant Acharya Vignesh who has come down from Haridwar to participate in the shramdan.

www.nytimes.com

NEW YORK, USA, May 20, 2008: When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong. Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit. Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book, said “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students. “A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” said Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”

www.hinduismtoday.com

news.bbc.co.uk

KATHMANDU, NEPAL, May 29, 2008: The Himalayan nation of Nepal has become the world’s newest republic, ending 240 years of monarchy. A constituent assembly meeting in the capital, Kathmandu, overwhelmingly voted to abolish royal rule. The Maoists, the largest party after laying down arms and standing in last month’s elections, were committed to ousting King Gyanendra. People celebrated wildly in the streets of the capital after news of the assembly vote.

The approved proposal states that Nepal is “an independent, indivisible, sovereign, secular and an inclusive democratic republic nation”. Royal privileges “will automatically come to an end”, the declaration says. It also states that the king’s main palace must be vacated within a fortnight, to be transformed into a museum.

The Maoists and other politicians are being conciliatory about the monarch now being ousted and say he should live on in Nepal as a private citizen. Some militant pro-Hindu and pro-royal factions are campaigning against Nepal’s shedding of its royal - and its officially Hindu - status.