{"id":15752,"date":"2017-10-10T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-10T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2017\/10\/10\/breaking-cultural-barriers-embracing-my-bindi\/"},"modified":"2017-10-10T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-10-10T12:00:00","slug":"breaking-cultural-barriers-embracing-my-bindi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2017\/10\/10\/breaking-cultural-barriers-embracing-my-bindi\/","title":{"rendered":"Breaking Cultural Barriers: Embracing my Bindi"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.statepress.com\/article\/2017\/10\/spmagazine-breaking-cultural-barriers-embracing-my-bindi\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>TEMPE, ARIZONA., October 4, 2017 (The State Press by Ranjani Venkatakrishnan): The little red dot you see Hindu women wear is meant to control the concentration of energy at the chakra point in the center of our forehead. To me, it was part of my identity. Back in my Texas elementary school days, it also made me a target. The bindi on my forehead, a symbol of my Hindu religion, was constantly mistaken for blood. &#8220;Why do you wear it?&#8221; I was asked, yet I was too young to know the significance in order to explain it. &#8220;It&#8217;s just something part of my religion,&#8221; I would answer, but I eventually stopped wearing bindis to school, no matter how much my parents scolded me for it. Sometimes, I would wear the bindi at home, and then discard it as soon as I arrived to school.<\/p>\n<p>When one thinks of racial and cultural groups facing a hard time in society, one hardly ever thinks about prejudice towards Indians. Ridiculing a person just because he or she is different is not okay. Making fun of another person&#8217;s religion is not okay. Attempting to convert them, or make them feel bad for believing in the gods they do believe in, is not okay. Today, I am glad that at Arizona State University, I can wear Indian clothes to class if I want to switch it up on a random day, and almost no one would bat an eye. In fact, if anything, people might compliment me on my kurti or chudidhar. I bring my packed Indian food from home to college and sometimes eat it in the downtown Barrett suite between classes, and no one complains. I wear a bindi if I want, and nobody asks about it. <\/p>\n<p>More at &#8220;source&#8221; above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source TEMPE, ARIZONA., October 4, 2017 (The State Press by Ranjani Venkatakrishnan): The little red dot you see Hindu women,&#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-15752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15752","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=15752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15752\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}