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31 March 2007 -
News Updates
A Worldwide web of worship - Washington Post
Young carnivores in a veggie nation - Chicago Tribune
India's past isn't past - New York Times
Is India completely beyond our grasp - NY Times
A Worldwide web of worship
14
March 2007, Washington Post, By Kevin Sullivan
Balaji, a Hindu priest, stood before the reclining god and
offered a plate of coconut and bananas. His chest bare and his face adorned
with red and yellow sacred paste, he set the food at the foot of a statue
that Hindus regard as an embodiment of the powerful god Vishnu.
Following ancient tradition deep inside one of India's
oldest and holiest temples in Tiruchirapalli, he chanted Vishnu's names 108
times to beseech health, wealth and good fortune -- not for himself, but for
an Indian emigrant living in London who had purchased the prayer with her
credit card on a Hindu Web site. "If you wish to make an offering, the god
will accept it -- even if it's on the Internet," said Balaji, standing
barefoot in the hot sand of the South Indian temple compound.
"The first wave of religion online, in the 1990s, was
mainly for nerds and young people and techies," said Morten Hojsgaard, a
Danish author who has written extensively about online religion. "But now it
really is a mirror of society at large. This is providing a new forum for
religious seekers." Hojsgaard said the number of Web pages dealing with God,
religion and churches increased from 14 million in 1999 to 200 million in
2004. Religion now nearly rivals sex as a topic on the Internet: A search
for "sex" on Google returns about 408 million hits, while a search for "God"
yields 396 million.
Hojsgaard
said "The boom in online religion comes at a time when people,
especially the young, are questioning traditional institutions. There is more emphasis on individualism. We want
to decide for ourselves."
India, with more than 1.1
billion people and a passion for technology, has become a leader in the
practice of religion online, through a very large number of often very small
Web sites, a pattern that reflects the decentralization of much of religious
life here. Hindus sitting in the United States or Europe watch streaming
live video of morning prayers from temples in their home towns. Sikhs listen
to podcasts of prayers from Kashmir.
Members of
India's fast-growing
middle class have also embraced the Internet in ways that startle their parents. At many Hindu temples, a priest's typical day includes pre-dawn
prayers for a sacred cow or elephant, and time set aside to read e-mails
asking for blessings.
On a cold and rainy January day, Kumudini Kumararajah
logged on to her computer in
London and started
shopping for prayers. Kumararajah, 36, is a Hindu who moved to London from
India eight years ago. She prays every day, she said, at home and in a small
temple in Tooting. Every morning and evening she performs a puja, an offering to a
god, seeking a blessing of health and happiness. But she said performing
pujas in London was never as meaningful to her as doing them in the ancient
temples of India, where Hinduism was born.
Said Kumararajah
"The gods there are very powerful, I always want
to pray there, but it is not possible for me because I live in
London." Then she heard
about Saranam.com, a Web site based in Chennai, in southern India, that
sells "Hindu rituals and products," whether they are prayers or auspicious
names for a baby.
Clicking her way to Saranam.com, Kumararajah recalled, she
arrived at a site that looked like the home page of bookseller Amazon.com,
with colorful graphics and a slick menu of products and services. She could choose from a menu including "pujas for
health" and "pujas for children." She chose a puja for wealth, health and
happiness -- asking for help in finding a husband and having a family, and
for the family software business to prosper. Then she chose Sri Rangam,
a thousand-year-old complex near Tiruchirapalli,
one of India's most venerated religious sites, about 200 miles south of
Chennai near the southern tip of
India. The centerpiece of the temple is a reclining image of
Vishnu, which draws Hindus from across the world.
She filled in her billing address and paid with
her Visa card over a secure server. She chose a package of 12 pujas a year, to be performed each month on her "star day" according to
Hindu astrology. She also chose a second puja to be performed each month to
a goddess at the temple. Total price for her personalized package of
worship: about $140, or about $6 per puja. "I could never do this before,"
she said, her chestnut eyes beaming. "The gods are happy when we perform
pujas."
Saranam.com was founded by Mahesh Mohanan and Mervyn Jose,
a pair of young computer software engineers in Chennai, the steamy port city
formerly known as
Madras.
It is home both to some of India's most magnificent old temples and to some
of its most cutting-edge technology firms. Mohanan said he hit on the idea
shortly after his marriage in 1999, when his new mother-in-law insisted that
he and his new bride visit 15 Hindu temples over three days to seek
blessings. "It was exhausting," Mohanan said. "I thought it would be so much
easier if I could just do it on the Internet."
With financial backing from a local businessman,
Saranam.com was up and running within weeks as a for-profit company. The
site now gets about 100,000 visits a year and about 200 orders each month,
the company says. Most customers buy pujas to pray for sick relatives, to
ease marital or financial problems -- or even, in the case of some Indians
living in the United States,
to help get a green card. At first, most of the customers came from the 20
million or so Indians who live overseas. But now most are Americans,
Europeans and people from the Middle East who have become interested in
Hinduism, at least in part because of information available on the Internet.
Shaunaka Rishi Das, director of the Center for Hindu
Studies at Oxford
University,
said Hindus traditionally give little formal religious instruction to
children, who learn largely from family tradition. Now the Internet is
allowing many Hindus to learn about their religion in depth for the first
time. "Hindus have jumped on this technology," he said.
A
few weeks after Kumararajah ordered her puja in London, 5,000 miles away in
the 92-degree southern Indian sun, T.K. Jayaraaman walked barefoot into Sri
Rangam, a 236-foot-high structure with ornate carvings in soft pastel blues,
pinks and greens, a 156-acre complex of 21 towers decorated with colorful
and ornate carvings. The retired schoolteacher, 65, is the local contact for
Saranam.com.
Jayaraaman walked deeper into the temple complex, arriving
at a door that only Hindus may pass through. Inside, he said, he stood
before the reclining god, bowed his head and handed the offering basket to
Balaji, the priest. Balaji blessed the
red and yellow powder, made from vermilion, sandalwood and
turmeric, tucked it into a folded bit
of white paper and handed it back to Jayaraaman. Eventually the packet would
be mailed to Kumararajah in
London,
along with a letter certifying that her order with Saranam.com had been
filled. "I don't know anything about these people -- except their name and
star date," he said. "But it makes me very proud to send them God's grace."
Outside the temple later, Balaji said he liked the temple's
mix of old and new. Many people live far away and cannot travel here, he
pointed out, so Saranam.com and other Internet-based services are bringing a
new wave of worshipers to his ancient temple in spirit, a phenomenon the
temple encourages. "Of course," he said, "we have a Web site, too."
Back in chilly
London, Kumararajah
awaited her shipment in the offices of the family software company; her
mother and sister also purchase pujas regularly from Saranam.com. When the
red and yellow powder
arrives,
Kumararajah
said, she will mix it with a few drops of
water and wear it on her forehead, in the traditional Hindu style indicating
the presence of God. "I will put it on every day," she said. "It will give
me peace of mind."
Top of the page
Young carnivores in a veggie nation
14
March 2007, Chicago Tribune, By Laurie Goering
It's
not easy being a meat eater in India, the world center of vegetarianism.
With close to 200 million strict vegetarians and another half-billion people
who only rarely sample meat, India caters to vegetarians as the norm. Most
supermarkets are vegetarian. So are many roadside restaurants, their signs
touting "Veg," "Pure Veg" or "100 Percent Vegetarian" cuisine. In India, it
is meat eaters, not vegetarians, who must comb the menu, like at
Pizza Hut, to find something
appealing, usually in the limited "non-veg" section at the bottom.
I am not a particularly devoted carnivore. I have at times
gone months without eating meat, largely because I was too lazy to make
anything for dinner beyond a bowl of cereal. I also have spent much of my
adult life working in meat-loving regions of the world where being a
vegetarian amounts to eating plates of rice and french fries and very little
else. But I now have carnivorous children, raised in
South Africa, where a
unifying cultural feature across all races and ethnicities is a love of
grilled sausage and chops.
India,
for them, is a culinary puzzle.
At the local McDonald's, for instance, there is no beef.
India's Hindu
majority reveres the cow as a holy mother, so slaughter of cattle is banned.
Bacon is out as well because of
India's
significant Muslim minority. That leaves fish and chicken sandwiches, served
up with egg-free mayonnaise. But the biggest selection at McDonald's is
vegetarian: a McVeggie burger; the McAloo Tikki and the Veg
McCurry Pan.
India's vegetarian
sensibilities date back to about 500 B.C., when growing Buddhism and
Jainism--an offshoot of Hinduism that abhors any taking of life--began
pushing the country's meat-eating early pastoralists off the cultural map.
Today, many Indian Hindus eschew meat eating as a drag on
spiritual advancement, a potential karmic burden and simply cruel. Some
Jains, the strictest of vegetarians, won't touch even carrots or onions for
fear that insects or worms were harmed as the vegetables were pulled from
the ground. Some Indians adopt a vegetarian diet for health reasons. "Meat eating contributes to a mentality of violence, for
with the chemically complex meat ingested one absorbs the slaughtered
creature's fear, pain and terror," warns Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, a
revered Hindu guru.
In the land of fragrant
cauliflower curry, spicy fried lentil soup and tantalizing warm carrot
pudding, the best option is slowly coming clear. We need to bite the bhajia--a
veggie fritter--and join the crowd.
Top of the page
For Luxury Travelers, India's past Isn't past
4
March 2007, New York Times, By Somini Sengupta
AMONG the activities offered to guests at Wildflower Hall,
where once stood an English soldier's summer villa in the lap of the
Himalayas, are guided
walking tours. As if to drive home the point, horseback riding, lawn croquet
and archery are also on offer - all without a trace of irony.
Wildflower Hall, in northern
India, is among a new
breed of luxury hotels sprouting across the country, each in its own manner
peddling a fable of the country. Devi Garh, nestled in the Aravali hills in
Rajasthan, markets the nostalgia of the medieval Indian countryside; the
stylishly restored palace literally sits atop the village that its residents
once ruled and where bullocks still pull wooden plows to till the land.
An ayurvedic doctor and a massage menu is offered to wring
out modern stress, plus an up-to-date gym in which to work off the buttery
millet croissants offered at breakfast.
Wealthy Indians of another era would rather spend a luxury
holiday in
Europe or the United
States. If there were luxury properties in this country at all, they were
once limited to the five-star hotel in the major metropolis and filled
mostly by foreigners. No longer. Indians are traveling more than ever in their
own country, including those who now have considerably more money to spend
and much less anxiety about flaunting it. At Ananda in the Himalayas, a spa near the Hindu pilgrimage town of
Rishikesh, for instance, Indians
now comprise about a third of all guests, and their share is soon expected
to climb to half, increasingly including Indians who live abroad. From
Indian hoteliers, including the Oberoi chain, have lately come a new menu of
options for the pampered class, from resorts built from the crumbling
palaces of erstwhile maharajas to plush detoxifying spas to sumptuous inns
along the coast and in forests.
Wildflower Hall is perched at around 8,300 feet, amid a
forest of cedar and pine, roughly eight miles outside Simla.
We arrived at dusk. Upstairs, the Cavalry
Bar was empty. A fire roared in the fireplace. We ordered a bottle of Montepulciano and were happy for the serenity of dusk.
The morning began gloriously gray-blustery -- perfect, we
figured, for a six-mile guided trek through the forest. The forest floor was
covered with star-moss fern and flowers that had clung on from summer. The
cedars, also known as Himalayan deodars, were the beauties of the forest.
They held out their wide arms, and the wind, which howled so ferociously
that we could hardly hear each other on the trail, made them dance a
spectacular dance. We climbed down into valleys, and up again into dark woods.
The villages on our path were a sobering lesson in isolated living: two long
houses here, four long houses there, their slate roofs still glistening from
a recent rain. We passed several accommodating cows, groves of famous Simla
apples and, nestled in a grove of tall cedars, a pointy-roofed Tibetan-style
temple that our guide, John, said was once Buddhist and is now Hindu. All
morning, cloud and mist came and went as they pleased, revealing new faces
of the Pir Panjal range.
No sooner had we reached the hotel than the sky burst with
rain. And how lucky we were for it. From our room, we had a spectacular view
of the eastern
Himalayas, with layer upon layer of gray mountain spreading before us, all
the way to Tibet. The storm raged, and the cedars, arms outstretched, danced
like dervishes in praise of rain. We watched the storm from the stillness of
our room. After a six-mile climb in the
hills, the warm chocolate cookies that had been placed in our room were a
tasty reward.
The best reward, on
our last night at Wildflower, was evening in the empty hot tub. We slipped
into the water, our ears perfectly cold, our toes perfectly warm, as night
fell on these ancient mountains.
Top of the page
Is
India completely beyond our grasp?
25 March 2007, The New York Times, By Jonathan Allen
For the first-time visitor to
India, the sheer vastness
of the country — more than a million square miles — all but defeats the
romantic notion of seeing all that this place has to offer in anything
approaching the usual time frame of a normal vacation. Retirees no longer
punching the clock, college students who want to take a couple of semesters
off, backpackers on a global journey of exploration: these are the kinds of
travelers that India seems made for.
But what about the rest of us who are limited to one or two
weeks of vacation a year? Is
India completely beyond
our grasp? In a word, no. Even sampling the tiniest geographical crumb of
India over a period of 7 to 10 days can be a satisfying travel experience.
Quite rightly, no one wants to miss the Taj Mahal,
especially on a first visit, so our suggested route pivots around that
Platonic ideal of tourist attractions.
Rajasthan? That
fascinating, tourist-infested merry-go-round has been deliberately omitted,
though it is a place worth coming back to when you have time to explore its
less overdeveloped pockets. The hiking trails of the
Himalayas
and the beaches of Goa? Next time.
Spending a couple of days first in
the nearby capital of
New Delhi
— a strange patchwork of imperial Mughal monuments, bustling urban villages,
leafy British Raj-era avenues and expanding middle-class housing colonies —
is bound to give you a good taste of urban India. Still, some two-thirds of
Indians live outside the nation's cities. With that in mind, a trip
to Agra is
best taken by train, at
least in part for the inevitable encounters with locals.
Between
Delhi and Agra lies a
strange, never quite fully rural hinterland, the novelty of
waving at the trains happily never wears off for children living near the
tracks. It's an impressive feat for a foreigner to not make some new friends
on an Indian train, whether sitting with the bureaucrats and retired majors
in the air-conditioned carriages, or the farmers and migrant laborers
squeezing into the cheap seats. Though not even an astrologer would rush
into making generalizations about an entire sixth of humanity, it seems fair
to say that Indians are mostly a gregarious bunch, always ready to submit
strangers to a cheerful interview.
As a kind of
Agra appetizer, drive out
to Akbar's mausoleum in Sikandra, a little over five miles northwest of the
city center. The perfectly named Gateway of Magnificence is the real
highlight here. But it's his grandson's final resting place that you've
really come all this way for. Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal in the 17th
century as the mausoleum for his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died soon
after giving birth to her 14th child. A red sandstone gateway blocks off all
sight of the Taj until the very last, sudden moment, and the cymbal crash
that is the first real-life glimpse of its absurd beauty tends to
reverberate. Up close, interior marble surfaces still glow with flowers made
of inlaid precious stones, while the lovely giant squiggles of stylized
Persian calligraphy on the outside walls put the letters of our dowdy Roman
alphabet to shame.
The 16th-century Agra Fort offers perhaps the
dreamiest view of the Taj yet from the ornate tower in which Shah Jahan was
imprisoned for the final eight years of his life by his son, with whom he
did not get on so well. Fatehpur Sikri, the whimsical city built by Akbar in
1571 and abandoned to the parakeets 15 years later because it was too far
from the nearest water source, is no more than an hour's drive from
Agra.
NEXT morning take the two-hour train down to the cliff-top fortress at
Gwalior. The highlight
here is the Mansingh Palace. Back down in the
town, Gwalior's former royal family still live in the grand white
19th-century Jai
Vilas
Palace
(their smaller spare palace next door has been converted into a luxury
hotel).
About 90 minutes south of
Gwalior by train, Orchha
was once the grand capital city of the powerful Bundela clan, but is now a cheerful farming village. The main
17th-century, semi-ruined palace complex sits on what amounts to an island
in the Betwa, an implausibly clean and pretty river.
A 20-minute walk south along the river bank leads to the
cenotaphs of Orchha's former rulers, each a large mansion-size hunk of
spire-topped stone. You can sit among the spires enjoying the river views
alongside the resident vultures. On one side of the square
in Orchha village stands the cavernous Chaturbhuj Mandir, looking as much
like a hollowed-out European cathedral as a Hindu temple; nearby is the
Ram Raja Temple, a magnet
for Hindu pilgrims and wedding parties.
After the six-hour train ride back to
Delhi, if there's still
some time to kill, head for the Atrium, the tea room at the 1930's Imperial
Hotel on central Delhi's Janpath. Take a seat near the fountain in this most
opulent of Raj-era relics, order tea and cakes, pull out your
guidebook, and begin plotting your return to
India.
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