{"id":13748,"date":"2014-08-29T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-29T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2014\/08\/29\/hindu-summer-camp-in-america\/"},"modified":"2014-08-29T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-08-29T12:00:00","slug":"hindu-summer-camp-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2014\/08\/29\/hindu-summer-camp-in-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Hindu Summer Camp in America"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/08\/23\/us\/building-on-us-tradition-camp-for-hindu-children-strengthens-their-identity.html?_r=0\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>MACEDON, NEW YORK, August 28, 2014 (NY Times): Just before July a decade ago when Neha Dhawan turned 11, her mother informed her, &#8220;You&#8217;re going to Hindu camp this summer.&#8221; Growing up Indian-American in Shreveport, La., was already a conflicted proposition for Neha. As the daughter of two immigrant doctors, she dutifully went with her parents to a Hindu temple and sat through their favorite Bollywood movies. In the other half of her hyphenated life, she joined her middle school&#8217;s pep squad and rarely missed an episode of &#8220;Lizzie McGuire.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>So the last thing that Neha wanted the summer of 2004 was to be even more identified as an Indian and a Hindu. That summer, she says now with retrospection, changed her life. She loved doing morning yoga, her hair still cool and damp from the shower. She discovered a favorite bhajan. She spoke with her peers and their college-age counselors about dealing with stereotypes and racism. &#8220;I realized,&#8221; she said, &#8220;it&#8217;s O.K. to be proud of who you are.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>There is a long, rich history of religious and ethnic groups using summer camps to strengthen the denominational and ancestral identity of young people in a polyglot nation with an enticingly secular popular culture. The Indian immigrants who arrived in the last half-century are relatively recent and especially avid adopters. Shana Sippy, a professor of religion at Carleton College in Minnesota who has studied Hindu-American educational organizations, estimated that 135 such camps now exist. These range from overnight retreats to day camps to sleep-away programs like that of the Hindu Heritage Summer Camp.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source MACEDON, NEW YORK, August 28, 2014 (NY Times): Just before July a decade ago when Neha Dhawan turned 11,,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}