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Om Sweet Om

Yesterday, one of my team members at the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) noticed a rather curious omission on Wikipedia’s “Interfaith dialog” page.  All the major religions have a section on the page, except for Hinduism!  Of course, the beauty of Wikipedia is that someone from HAF can (and will) edit the page with appropriate content…

Over the past few weeks, the news from Pakistan has been dominated by the case of Rinkel Kumari, a Hindu teenage girl who was kidnapped from home. Rinkel eventually turned up…but converted to Islam, supposedly of her own free will, and married to a Muslim man.  The court proceedings have been a sham, and instead…

Almost one year later, NPR invited me back to their studio here in NYC to record another segment on the ongoing debate over yoga’s Hindu roots.  The piece, by Margot Adler, was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition today.  It also includes interviews with New York Times writer William Broad and  yoga teachers, Alison West and…

I ran across a great piece by Prof. Anant Rambachan on Hinduism and homosexuality and thought it is worthwhile sharing. In particular, my favorite lines from his piece are as follows: There are important teachings in the Hindu tradition that affirm the equal worth of all sexual orientations. In the Hindu tradition, the value of…

The Huffington Post is currently featuring a debate entitled “Is Yoga a Hindu Practice?”  On one side, it features Suhag Shukla, Managing Director/Legal Counsel of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), who argues that yoga is absolutely rooted in Hindu philosophy.  Suhag is pitted again Tara Stiles, a well-known yoga teacher here in NYC who has…

Ahh, the Choudhury’s are still at it.  First, Bikram wanted to patent “his” sequence of asanas.  And now, his wife, Rajashree, is out to make yoga a competitive sport.  Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that an organization called USA Yoga, founded by Rajashree, is hosting a national yoga competition this weekend in…

Hindus around the world just celebrated Shivaratri, a night dedicated to the worship and celebration of Lord Shiva.  The festivities and worship go on all night, as this is the night – according to some – that Lord Shiva performed the Tandava, the dance of primal creation, preservation, and destruction. As a child, my mother…

By now, we’ve all read about the benefits of teaching yoga to children.  And despite the ongoing separation-of-church-and-state debate,  some schools do offer yoga classes to their students. Another group finding the benefits of yoga are prison inmates.  I ran across  this is a beautiful piece about Gino Sevacos, an inmate in San Quentin State…

Yesterday, I attended a screening of a documentary entitled The Bhagavad Gita at the Rubin Museum in NYC.  Perhaps it’s the years of reading distorted descriptions about Hinduism and its texts that tend to make me weary of these types of efforts, but I decided to hop on the subway and view the documentary.  Plus,…

Acknowledging the “outpouring of criticism” the Broad yoga piece received, the New York Times’ India blog published a nice blurb earlier today, taking stock of some of the reactions in India to yoga in the West.  The last quote by Nivedita Joshi is spot on: http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/the-great-yoga-divide/?src=rechp
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