RISHIKESH, INDIA, March 22, 2011: The organizers and participants in the International Yoga Festival reported in yesterday’s HPI, ‘US-Style Yoga Upsets Balance at Indian Festival,’ have challenged the Telegraph newspaper report as blatantly inaccurate. A further report and numerous comments are posted at the spiritvoyage.com blog (above), including these two, the first from Sadhvi Bhagawati of Parmath Niketan, organizer of…
KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA, March 15, 2011: A small ethnic Indian community Chitty — that arrived in Malacca from Tamil Nadu for trade much prior to the Europeans and the Chinese in the 16th century — has demanded the Malaysian government to designate them as ‘bumiputra’ – sons of the soil. In the Malacca state, there are about 1,500 families of…
NASHVILLE, U.S., March 2011: Vishnu: Hinduism’s Blue-Skinned Savior is a new exhibit at Nashville’s Frist Center for the Visual Arts that aims to introduce American art audiences to the visual beauty of the intricate ways Hindus throughout time have rendered their deities. Curator Joan Cummins, of the Brooklyn Museum, described the goals of the exhibit recently. ‘First, to introduce one…
O resplendent Lord, if I were the sole monarch of wealth as you have been, then my worshippers would have been rich! Rig Veda 8.14.1 Source
NEW YORK, March 8, 2011: (by Mark Bittman) The oldest and most common dig against organic agriculture is that it cannot feed the world’s citizens; this, however, is a supposition, not a fact. And industrial agriculture isn’t working perfectly, either: the global food price index is at a record high, and our agricultural system is wreaking havoc with the health…
UNITED STATES, March 2011: The Justice Department has filed suit against California prison officials on behalf of a Sikh inmate who says his religious freedom was violated when officials punished him for not cutting his beard. Practitioners of Sikhism hold that cutting one’s hair violates God’s design. Sukhjinder Basra was punished for refusing to shave his beard in accordance with…
UNITED KINGDOM, March 20, 2011: The world has just experienced the biggest full moon for almost two decades when the satellite reached its closest point to Earth. On 19 March, the full moon looked unusually large in the night sky as it reaches a point in its cycle known as ‘lunar perigee’. Stargazers were treated to a spectacular view with…
NEW DELHI, INDIA, March 4, 2011: In 2010, 5,693 children found homes in the country, up from 2,169 in 2008, the latest government data shows. There has been a fall in adoptions by foreigners — 804 in 2008 and only 587 last year. ‘Adopting children from poorer nations in Africa is much easier. Hollywood star Angelina Jolie has been a…
UNITED KINGDOM, March 9, 2011: The blonde Californian in her 40s writhed as she performed her ‘power flow yoga’, to the shock of traditionalists. By the time Shiva Rea, famed for inventing the high-energy Yoga Trance Dance, had completed her demonstration at a yoga festival in northern India, some 20 people had left the room. For thousands of years, yoga…
UNITED STATES, February 2011: Padmaja Patel, a practicing internal medicine physician in Midland, presents an Introduction to Hinduism in three parts. Part I introduced the concepts of karma, reincarnation, dharma, an all pervasive deity, and Hindu scriptures. Part II explored the Nature of God and Part III the Nature of the Soul — this is the third installment of her…