{"id":14151,"date":"2015-04-07T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-04-07T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2015\/04\/07\/oh-my-gods-the-triumphs-of-a-little-brown-kid\/"},"modified":"2015-04-07T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-04-07T12:00:00","slug":"oh-my-gods-the-triumphs-of-a-little-brown-kid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2015\/04\/07\/oh-my-gods-the-triumphs-of-a-little-brown-kid\/","title":{"rendered":"Oh My Gods: The Triumphs of a Little Brown Kid"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/sutheshna-mani\/oh-my-gods-the-triumphs-of-a-little-brown-kid_b_6974602.html\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, April 1, 2015 (Huffington Post by Sutheshna Mani): As a young brown girl growing up in suburban San Diego, I was an anomaly at times, being one of few Hindus in a town that was proudly Judeo-Christian. I wanted to be an &#8220;all-theist,&#8221; dabbling into every religion. I saw myself as the girl version of young Pi Patel, trekking into various religious holdings, finding God in a church, mosque, synagogue and a Buddhist temple. To me, all faiths shared similarities, and my childhood naivete could not comprehend tension and factionalism within and between these religions. I was also incapable of understanding why my teacher went so in-depth with the Abrahamic faiths, but skipped over the eastern religions, including mine.<\/p>\n<p>I was too young to register subtle bigotry exuded by some fellow students. A common form of racial micro-aggression is the &#8220;rhetorical question,&#8221; whereby a peer will ask a question that&#8217;s meant as a cultural jab, rather than a genuine question. I received many of these growing up: &#8220;Don&#8217;t you pray to cows?&#8221; &#8220;Why do you guys believe in all these Gods, I mean isn&#8217;t there just one?&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>As I delved deeper into my roots, I realized Hinduism is more of a philosophy than it is a religion. As hackneyed of a notion as this is, there is no absolute fundamental belief in God in Hinduism. In fact, one could be an agnostic and be a Hindu. One can work within the infrastructures of one&#8217;s faith and choose core values to identify with. Within such a structure, I admired strong female figures like Kali, goddess of strength and empowerment, and Sarasvati, goddess of wisdom and learning. <\/p>\n<p>More at source.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, April 1, 2015 (Huffington Post by Sutheshna Mani): As a young brown girl growing up in,&#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-14151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14151","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=14151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}