{"id":8029,"date":"2009-07-17T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-17T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2009\/07\/17\/wanted-elephants-for-us-weddings\/"},"modified":"2009-07-17T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-07-17T12:00:00","slug":"wanted-elephants-for-us-weddings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2009\/07\/17\/wanted-elephants-for-us-weddings\/","title":{"rendered":"Wanted: Elephants For U.S. Weddings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Source: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dnaindia.com\/opinion\/column_wanted-elephants-for-us-weddings_1274631\">www.dnaindia.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>USA, July 16, 2009: Unemployment has hit America&#8217;s human workforce hard, but with the growing affluence of 2 million Hindu-Americans, well-mannered elephants are much in demand for weddings, temple consecrations and re-consecrations.<\/p>\n<p>Last week Minnie, a magnificent-looking 37-year-old elephant&#8211;dolled up with a gold-studded shield on her forehead and a Hindu priest armed with a parasol astride her &#8212; participated in the re-consecration of the Ganesha temple in Flushing, NY, one of the oldest and largest temples in the U.S. Thousands of devotees congregated to attend the ceremonies, which were part of a $4 million renovation plan. Though times are hard, new Hindu temples are sprouting up across this country and others are being expanded as the Indian-American community becomes more prosperous. <\/p>\n<p>Another elephant, retired from a circus and living in Texas, is rented out by its owner for weddings as far away as New Jersey, New York and the DC area&#8211;and has even crossed the border into Canada to lead a procession. Indian weddings are a study in extravagance, and the big fat Indian wedding has definitely arrived on these shores, with the status games in full play.<\/p>\n<p>According to Dr Adarsh Deepak, president of the Dharma Association of North America, these grand gestures are all about &#8220;making a statement&#8221;. &#8220;It is a way for the Hindu community to say, we have arrived, we made it.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source: www.dnaindia.com USA, July 16, 2009: Unemployment has hit America&#8217;s human workforce hard, but with the growing affluence of 2,&#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-8029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8029","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=8029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8029\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}