{"id":14931,"date":"2016-05-03T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-03T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2016\/05\/03\/na-mah-staaay\/"},"modified":"2016-05-03T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-03T12:00:00","slug":"na-mah-staaay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2016\/05\/03\/na-mah-staaay\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Na-mah-staaay&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.northbynorthwestern.com\/story\/na-mah-staaay\/ \">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>ILLINOIS, U.S., May 2, 2016 (North by Northwesternby Gauri Rangrass): I remember the first time I wished I were white. I was four years old. My brownness was harder to hide. It was something I spent fifteen years of my life trying to like, and eventually, love. My internal battle with Hinduism was even more difficult. It was not long into my childhood before I started to reject my Hindu identity. I fought with my parents when they encouraged me to go to the temple. I never bothered to learn the significance of Hindu traditions, which were often the only way my mother could make her new home in Michigan feel familiar.<\/p>\n<p>The first time I picked up and read a Hindu philosophy book, I was sixteen. I learned about Dharma and Hinduism. It made sense to me. It felt intrinsic. By the time I started my freshman year at Northwestern, I had finally reclaimed Hinduism as a part of my identity.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe that&#8217;s why, as I sit on a yoga mat in Studio 2 in SPAC, anger rushes through my veins when a white instructor presses her hands together, leans over, and says, &#8220;Na-mah-staaay.&#8221; I&#8217;m the only brown person in the class and it seems that I&#8217;m also the only one who feels uncomfortable returning the gesture. Not once does the instructor reference the Indian and Hindu origins of yoga. Why can&#8217;t this trendy yoga persona also include a true understanding of yoga&#8217;s Hindu origins? <\/p>\n<p>More of this interesting opinion piece at &#8220;source&#8221; above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source ILLINOIS, U.S., May 2, 2016 (North by Northwesternby Gauri Rangrass): I remember the first time I wished I were,&#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-14931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14931","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=14931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}