cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com

NEW YORK, USA, June 4, 2008: Rather than making long distance pilgrimages to bow at the feet of Ganesh or Vishnu, many of the Staten Island’s Hindu residents are practicing their faith a bit closer to home. About 100 families worship at the Prem Prakash Temple on Burgher Avenue, while several hundred more attend the Staten Island Hindu Temple on Victory Boulevard. It was formally consecrated over the Memorial Day weekend.

“It fills you with pride to have a temple in your own neighborhood,” said Krishne Urs, an orthopedic surgeon who is the chairman of the Staten Island Hindu Temple. “It’s convenient and easy not to have to travel so far to worship God,” he said. But it is not only about convenience. For many new immigrants, the building of a neighborhood place of worship is a sign of a group’s arrival — taking something from home and transplanting it here.

“Religious institutions in the immigrant experience in America have been a way for immigrants to not only have a particular religious experience, but to get social support,” said Nazli Kibria, a professor of sociology at Boston University. “As communities become more established it is a way to maintain themselves over time and to affirm their ties.”

“A temple’s construction is the final activity of a whole evolution that we see in the worship and activities of new immigrants,” said Madhulika S. Khandelwal, a professor of urban studies and director of the Asian-American Center at Queens College. “The fact that different temples are coming up is because people want their own places,” said Dr. Khandelwal. “One temple is not enough.”

beta.ph.news.yahoo.com

PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA, June 5, 2008: The United States will donate nearly US$1 million for conservation of the centuries-old Bakheng temple, a famous cultural icon in Cambodia’s Angkor temple complex, the embassy said in a statement Wednesday. It said the US$978,705 will be given to the nonprofit World Monuments Fund, a New York-based archaeological group that has been doing work at the temple since 2004.

The Angkor temples are Cambodia’s main tourist attraction, earning hundreds of millions of dollars for the cash-strapped Southeast Asian country. About 3,000 tourists climb the hill in the space of just a few hours to see the sunset everyday.

www.cnn.com

LONDON, ENGLAND, June 1, 2008: Jyoti is the Hindi word for light. It’s something Pranav Mehta has never had to live without. And he is lucky. Near where he lives in Gujarat, one of the most prosperous states in India, thousands of rural villages lack electricity or struggle with an intermittent supply at best. “Rural India is suffering a lot because of a lack of energy,” said Mehta.Much of that electricity will come from coal-fired power plants, like the US$4 billion so-called ultra mega complex scheduled to be built south of Tunda Wand. Yet Mehta has another solution for India’s chronic electricity shortage, one that does not involve power plants on the ground but instead massive sun-gathering satellites in geosynchronous orbits 22,000 miles in the sky.

His dream is to have satellites that would electromagnetically beam gigawatts of solar energy back to ground-based receivers, where it would then be converted to electricity and transferred to power grids. And because in high Earth orbit, satellites are unaffected by the earth’s shadow virtually 365 days a year, the floating power plants could provide round-the-clock clean, renewable electricity. “This will be kind of a leap frog action instead of just crawling,” said Mehta, who is the director of India operations for Space Island Group, a California-based company working to develop solar satellites. “It is a win-win situation.”

www.hinduismtoday.com

If our country is to produce robust, intellectual, and long-lived children who believe in God, we must, in my humble opinion, learn ways to control our sense organs. Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, from his book, Yoga Mala