Hindu Press International

Hinduism Today Releases October/November/December, 2010 Edition

Satyanatha — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 23:03:01 +0000

KAUAI, HI, USA, September 1, 2010: The October-November-December edition of Hinduism Today magazine has been released, both in printed and digital form. You can read it online here or see the visually rich digital edition.

The magazine is now available for free on your desktop. This issue of Hinduism’s flagship spiritual magazine brings you an unusual mix of stories, from the latest and controversial animated film to coping with “cabin fever,” that real-life ailment faced by those living in the tropics who suddenly find themselves living in cold climates where people stay indoors all winter.

The 2010 Kumbha Mela in Haridwar was no less intense and is the subject of our 16-page, photographically stunning feature. Mark Twain wrote of his 1895 visit to the Kumbha Mela, “It is beyond imagination, marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites.” We follow humankind’s greatest festival to its source, focusing on the devotional trials and tribulations of ordinary pilgrims–there were some 50 million there this year–and let our photographer, Dev Raj Agarwal, tell his story of trekking along the river Ganges from its source, and all of the changes it makes along the way.

The issue also contains articles on a US initiative to take yoga back from those who have abducted it from the Hindu cultural and spiritual repository, an online debate between two teenage friends, one an evangelizing Christian, the other an articulate Hindu who doesn’t think she or other nonbelievers are destined to go to a very bad place for a very long time. There is Arvind Sharma’s lofty defense of his choice to be a Hindu, a detailed story on the predictions of 2012 as the End of the World, and Ravi Grover’s take on why it’s not really right to put animals in captivity and use them as entertainment.

Our center section this time explores a new trend in matchmaking. The two models that once clashed–arranged marriage and do-as-you-please dating–are merging into something that can be called “arranged dating.” Parents meet and approve a daughter’s suitor, and then the couple embarks on the Western dating path, with all its implications and hazards. Plus we take a look at online resources for finding a life partner.

Our publisher, Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami, has a fresh take on the old adage “You are what you eat.” He suggests “You are whom you meet,” and guides us in our discovery of the importance of friends and companions, diving less into the ordinary reasons of business contacts into the mystical effect people have on our aura, our psychic energies and karmas.

In “Sita Sings the Blues” New York correspondent Lavina Melwani interviews the amazing film-maker Nina Paley. Remember how long the credits roll on a Pixar or Dreamworks animated film? Into the hundreds. Well, Ms. Paley made a full-length film all by her lonesome, a feat that took seven grueling years and resulted in a charming retelling of Sita’s story in the Ramayana, all from the woman’s point of view. Sure, a few Hindus called her take on Rama irreverent, while the tough critic Roger Ebert couldn’t find enough adjectives for this film (”wonderful, enchanted, astonishingly original, alive with personality”). The story of Sita’s story is itself quite a story and you can read it in the current issue.

Inside there is much more: humor, book reviews, scriptural excerpts from the Agamas that reveal meditation’s ultimate goal, digital resources and engrossing tidbits of Hindu experience around the globe. Hinduism Today is proud to be the place you go to learn about the entire Hindu family in the 21st century.

Glocal Hinduism

Satyanatha — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 23:02:01 +0000

Source: newsweek.washingtonpost.com

USA, September 1, 2010 (By Loriliai Biernacki): As we move into the 21st century, with a shrinking world, an entangled economy, and instantaneous communications with the other side of the planet, religious life is changing as well. Religious groups are able to meet the needs of adherents far away and minister to communities separated spatially from each other. For Hinduism, this has meant especially that a diasporic community has been able to reconnect with its roots far away. An engineer living in Denver, Colorado in the U.S. can offer a puja online at the famous temple for Venkateshwara and receive his or her prasad by mail from the temple in Tirupati. Hinduism is becoming global.

Hinduism’s philosophical underpinnings — the ideas of karma and rebirth, notably — are increasingly pervading American consciousness, and this spread of ideas will increase in the future.

In some sense, the trace of Hinduism as it moves across the globe in the future is as a kind of meme (an idea that spreads like a virus and affects, to some degree, the minds of those who get in touch with it), a conceptual and evolutionary hypothesis. As meme, this spread of Hindu conceptual tenets augurs a more healing and soulful alternative to the mechanization of our lives, our bodies, our minds.

The future of Hinduism suggests a kind of opening to a global world in a way that sidesteps the vision of a one-world government or one-world ideology. It proposes instead a world model without hegemonic center, linked by a thread of cosmology, multiplicity instanced as network, a seamless interconnectivity that echoes a conceptual cosmology from Hinduism’s past into our own global and glocal future.

A Hindu America, a Catholic Priest

Satyanatha — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 23:01:01 +0000

Source: www.newsindia-times.com

USA, September 1, 2010 (by Francis Xavier Clooney, S.J., a professor and a Roman Catholic priest) I recently came across a column by Loriliai Biernacki [HPI note: see previous post]. A friend of mine, she is a professor of Indian religions at the University of Colorado, and a specialist in the study of Hinduism. She suggests that Hinduism today is becoming much more widely established in different parts of the world, and it is flourishing in many parts of the U.S., both among Americans of Indian ancestry, but also among many converts to Hinduism.

I am tempted to confirm her insights out of my own experiences. But my thought now goes in a different direction: If there is truth in Biernacki’s insights, and there is, then what does this say about Christian identity in the U.S. now? Catholic identity?

Just think of the example of the growing comfort of a wide range of Americans - surely including Church-going Catholics - who accept reincarnation as a good spiritual possibility. This is no small change in the way people think.

If our neighbors are practicing yoga (even Christian yoga), meditating, visiting gurus, and enjoying the prospect of multiple deities and multiple births - then we have to bear down, and think more deeply about who we are and how we speak, act, live.

It is not enough to broadcast our faith without listening, or to insist with open mouths and closed ears that Jesus is the way and that Christian faith is superior to religions such as Hinduism, when we - the Church - seems not understand Hinduism except in a most superficial way, and have no clue why Americans might embrace reincarnation.

Daily Inspiration

Satyanatha — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 23:00:01 +0000

Source: www.hinduismtoday.com

A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him.
Swami Chinmayananda (1917-1993), Hindu writer, lecturer and founder of Chinmaya Mission International

Reincarnation, Now Also in America

Satyanatha — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:03:01 +0000

Source: www.nytimes.com

USA, August 27, 2010 (By Lisa Miller, the religion editor for Newsweek): According to data released last year by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, a quarter of Americans now believe in reincarnation. (Women are more likely to believe than men; Democrats more likely than Republicans.)

At Cannes in May, a Thai film about reincarnation, “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” won the highest prize. And Julia Roberts recently told Elle magazine that though she was raised Christian, she had become “very Hindu.” Ms. Roberts believes that in her past life she was a “peasant revolutionary,” and said that when her daughter sits in a certain way she knows “there’s someone there I didn’t get the benefit of knowing … It’s an honor for me to continue to shepherd that.”

In religious terms, the human narrative — birth, life, death and rebirth — has for millennia been relatively straightforward in the West. You were born. You lived. You died. After a judgment you went to heaven (or hell) forever and ever. Eternity was the end: no appeals allowed.

But nearly a billion Hindus and a half-billion Buddhists — not to mention the ancient Greeks, certain Jews and a few Christians — have for thousands of years believed something entirely different. Theirs is, as the theologians say, a cyclical view. You are born. You live. You die. And because nobody’s perfect, your soul is born again — not in another location or sphere, and not in any metaphorical sense, but right here on earth.

Gadadhara Pandit Dasa, Columbia University’s first Hindu chaplain, called it “a re-do,” like a test you get to take over. After an unspecified number of tries, the eternal soul finally achieves perfection. Only then, in what Hindus call moksha (or release), does the soul go to live with God.

Spiritually-minded Americans have had a love affair with Eastern religion at least since the Beatles traveled to India in 1968, but for more than a generation, reincarnation remained a fringe or even shameful belief.

“I can remember, 30 years ago, if a person wanted to learn about reincarnation, they would go into a bookstore and go into a very back corner, to a section called ‘Occult,’ ” said Janet Cunningham, president of the International Board for Regression Therapy, a professional standards group for past-life therapists and researchers. “It felt sneaky.” Now the East is in our backyards, accessible on the Internet and in every yoga studio.

At the same time, Western religion is failing to satisfy growing numbers of people — especially young adults. College students Mr. Dasa encounters, most of them raised as Christians or Jews, “haven’t given up on the idea of spirituality or religion,” he said. “They’re tired of the dogma they grew up with.” According to the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, 15 percent of Americans express no affiliation with any religious tradition, nearly double the number in 1990.

On the fringes of legitimate science, some researchers persist in studying consciousness and its durability beyond the body. Dr. Jim Tucker, who directs the Child and Family Psychiatry Clinic at the University of Virginia, is committed to the scientific study of what can only be called reincarnation.

He is carrying on the pioneering research of his mentor, Dr. Ian Stevenson, who beginning in the 1960s collected more than 2,000 accounts of children between the ages of 2 and 7 who seemed to remember previous lives vividly without the help of hypnosis. Dr. Stevenson did most of his casework in Asia, where belief in reincarnation is common.

Dr. Tucker studies American children and in one case found a young boy who started to say, around the age of 18 months, that he was his own (deceased) grandfather. “He eventually told details of his grandfather’s life that his parents felt certain he could not have learned through normal means,” Dr. Tucker wrote, “such as the fact that his grandfather’s sister had been murdered and that his grandmother had used a food processor to make milkshakes for his grandfather every day at the end of his life.”

Dr. Tucker won’t say such cases add up to proof of reincarnation, but he likes to keep an open mind. “There can be something that survives after the death of the brain and the death of the body that is somehow connected to a new child,” he said. “I have become convinced that there is more to the world than the physical universe. There’s the mind, which is its own entity.”

Amarnath Pilgrimage Comes to Quiet Close

Satyanatha — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:02:01 +0000

Source: blogs.wsj.com

INDIA, August 24, 2010: As the pilgrimage season to visit Amarnath in India-controlled Kashmir draws to a close today, the state government can count its blessings that the annual high-security event has not been embroiled in the troubles in the state.

Rakhi, the festival that celebrates the bond between sisters and brothers, is the official end to the two-month period when hundreds of thousands of devotees trek miles through the Himalayas to one of the most important shrines in Hinduism. The annual Amarnath journey is one of the world’s oldest religious pilgrimages with historical references dating back more than 2,000 years. Each winter an ice stalagmite forms in the sacred grotto there, forming a shape that Hindus associate with God Shiva.

While riots have engulfed much of Kashmir over the last two months, the pilgrimage, with tighter security than normal, carried on much as usual. More than 450,000 people from across India reportedly trekked through the snow clad peaks this year, with the help of Kashmiri porters and pony handlers and guides to pay obeisance at the cave shrine despite the fresh cycle of violence plaguing the rest of the region.

Separatist leaders in the Muslim-dominated (area) have made clear their beef is with the Indian state, not with the pilgrims who have provided much needed employment to Kashmiris while other kinds of tourism has suffered this summer.

Only Vegetarian Food At Commonwealth Games

Satyanatha — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:01:01 +0000

Source: www.hindustantimes.com

NEW DELHI, INDIA, August 25, 2010: About 22,000 volunteers, workers and almost an equal number of security personnel to be deployed at the venues of the Commonwealth Games will observe complete vegetarianism.

To cut costs, the Organizing Committee (OC) has opted for vegetarian items, to be served cold in packets, at a cost of around US$2.50 per head per day. The caterers will supply 40,000 such packets every day.

“Storing and serving non-vegetarian food in packaged form is difficult at the venues. So, we have opted for only vegetarian boxes. “But it won’t be less tasty or less in variety,” Sanjeev Mittal, director general in charge of catering at the venues said.

Now, the hundreds of performers, brought in from across the country for the opening and the closing ceremonies, might also have to eat the same food for about a month. The Ceremonies Functional Area — which has not yet decided on any food supplier — is considering a similar food option.

Daily Inspiration

Satyanatha — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:00:01 +0000

Source: www.hinduismtoday.com

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery. Today is a gift from God, that’s why it is called the present.

Rameswaram Temple Towers’ Structural Integrity Verified

Satyanatha — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 23:04:01 +0000

Source: www.hinduonnet.com

RAMESWARAM, INDIA, August 29, 2010: The east and west Rajagopurams of Sri Ramanathaswamy Temple in Rameswaram are strong, intact and there is no cause for concern, according to M. Muthiah, Superintending Engineer (Chief Sthapathi), Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowment.

After inspecting the towers of the temple in Rameswaram on Saturday, he said the 12-member expert committee, constituted by the State government to study the stability of the temple towers, particularly the Srirangam Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple towers, went up to the nine-story east Rajagopuram of Sri Ramanathaswamy Temple and studied the soundness of the structure. A few points of water leakage were found. There was a hole causing water seepage inside the tower. It had weakened the wooden beams in a few places.

There was a need to remove the weakened wooden beams and undertake related works so as to further strengthen the structures. Fresh beams could be inserted. A. Meher Prasad, Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, said except a few issues basically due to water leakages, there was no major problem

Religion-Based Groups Protest Aid Restriction in Bill

Satyanatha — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 23:03:01 +0000

Source: www.nytimes.com

UNITED STATES, August 25, 2010: More than 100 religion-based organizations are protesting a provision in pending American legislation that would prohibit them from receiving federal money if they consider a job applicant’s religion when hiring. On the other side of the debate, pushing for reform, is The Coalition Against Religious Discrimination, whose members include the American Civil Liberties Union, the Hindu American Foundation and the N.A.A.C.P.

In a letter sent Wednesday to all members of Congress, groups antagonizing the proposal contend that it would dilute protections they have under the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, as well as under the Constitution. “Those four lines in the legislation would be a seismic change in bedrock civil rights law for religious organizations,” said Steven McFarland, chief legal counsel at World Vision USA, a Christian aid organization that is leading the protest.

The debate over federal financing of programs operated by nonprofits with religious affiliations — or so-called charitable choice — dates back to the Clinton administration, when it became part of a welfare overhaul. Organizations are not allowed to discriminate against clients based on religion or require, say, attendance at church services as part of service delivery but are able to exercise their religious beliefs in hiring and other aspects of their operations.

The Coalition Against Religious Discrimination has been pushing Congress to eliminate “charitable choice” altogether for many years, and it said the pending bill did not go far enough.

Corporal Punishment Banned In Indian Public Schools

Satyanatha — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 23:02:01 +0000

Source: pib.nic.in

INDIA, August 27, 2010: Corporal punishment has been banned in all the schools affiliated to Central Board of Secondary Education. National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) has issued guidelines to all States/UTs as well as to the District Administrations for addressing the issue of corporal punishment in schools.

As per Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009, no child shall be subjected to physical punishment or mental harassment. The Ministry has written letters to all state governments to prohibit corporal punishment in all schools under their jurisdiction. Several states have reported that they have banned corporal punishment.

Private Detectives To Watch Over Mumbai Ganesha Festival

Satyanatha — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 23:01:01 +0000

Source: www.ndtv.com

MUMBAI, INDIA, August 20, 2010: In the wake of looming terror threats, the police have, for the first time, instructed various city mandals to hire the services of private detectives to ensure that pandals are secure and the festival passes off peacefully, police sources said. The job assigned to detectives will include keeping a hawk’s eye on any suspicious elements looking to start trouble and additionally to look out for pickpocket gangs.

Ganeshotsav will be celebrated on September 11. The next couple of months will see a slew of festivals like dahi handi, Ganesh Chaturthi, Ramzan and Diwali — all of which are celebrated with traditional fervour.

The matter came up for discussion during a high-level meeting with the city Commissioner of Police. Senior police officers holding the ranks of Joint Commissioner and Additional Commissioner were present to discuss issues relating to the Ganesh festival. The final call about private detectives will now be taken by Commissioner of Police (Mumbai), Sanjeev Dayal. If things go to plan, the process of hiring of detectives will begin by next week.

Daily Inspiration

Satyanatha — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 23:00:01 +0000

Source: www.hinduismtoday.com

The tragedy of human history is decreasing happiness in the midst of increasing comforts.
Swami Chinmayananda (1916-1993)

Religion Influences Doctor’s Decisions In Caring For Terminally Ill

Satyanatha — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 23:04:01 +0000

Source: www.medpagetoday.com

UNITED STATES, August 27, 2010: The religious beliefs of a doctor can play a part in end-of-life care discussions for terminally ill patients, a British study published this week in the Journal of Medical Ethics determined. Doctors who identified themselves as agnostic or atheist were two times more likely to talk about life-ending care than those who had strong religious beliefs.

Although ethnicity was unrelated, in general, to end-of-life decision-making, degree of religiosity did appear to influence it.

As such, Dr. Clive Seale, the study’s author, concluded that both religious and non-religious physicians alike should be required to disclose their views to patients–whose views he refers to as being “of paramount importance”–early on in the treatment process.

Seale mailed surveys to 8,857 British general practitioners, neurologists, elderly care specialists, palliative care specialists, and physicians from “other hospital” specialities; 42.1% responded. Compared with respondents to the British Social Attitudes survey of the U.K. general population, the physician respondents were less likely to be Christian (51.6% versus 71.6%), but more likely to be Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, or Muslim.

Dr. R. Sean Morrison, president of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine and director of the National Palliative Care Research Center, agreed with Seale’s conclusion about disclosure. “Physicians have feelings,” Morrison said. “Physicians have beliefs. And those feelings and beliefs can influence some of the advice and decisions they make. But the key is not to let those feelings and beliefs guide your care, but to recognize when it’s happening and how it might be in conflict with the patient’s best interest.”

Protests Erupt As Hindus Are Served Beef In Flood Camps

Satyanatha — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 23:03:01 +0000

Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN, August 24, 2010: Hundreds of minority Hindus rendered homeless by the devastating floods in Pakistan were served beef by authorities at a relief camp in Karachi, triggering protest from the community members. The Hindus belonging to the Baagri and Waghari nomadic tribes, who numbered around 600, are among 4,000 flood victims of different faiths living in the relief camp in Lyari area.

“We are Hindus and consumption of beef is prohibited in our religion,” Mohan Baagri, a Hindu living at the camp, said. Several women left the camp with their children and demanded that they be shifted elsewhere.

Following the protest, officials of the minority affairs ministry of Sindh province rushed to the camp and intervened to resolve the issue. Arrangements have now been made to give the camp residents rations so they can cook their own food.