All posts by HHR

The Celtic people spread from their homeland in what is now Germany across Europe in the first millennium bce. Iron tools and weapons rendered them superior to their neighbors. They were also skilled farmers, road builders, traders and inventors of a fast two-wheeled chariot. They declined in the face of Roman, Germanic and Slavic ascendency [...]

The great writer Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, The Perennial Philosophy, The Doors of Perception, Island) describes the “Dancing Shiva” image (Nataraj) of the Hindu tradition and its immense significance and comprehensiveness. This is from an interview with Mr. Huxley which was done in 1961 in London and was recorded and distributed under the title [...]

NEW DELHI: When night falls in this gritty capital, gangs troll the darkened streets looking for easy prey among a portion of the city’s vast homeless population; thousands have been rounded up and carried off in trucks in recent years. The police say they have increased patrols and set up roadblocks in an effort to [...]

Meditation may help with PTSD, but some yogis are dismayed that their peace-loving practice is now turned to combat training . Is yoga just for suburban baby-boomers and urban stress junkies seeking a hipper way to stay youthful and fit? Not if a growing number of yoga fanatics inside the US military get their way. [...]

Madan Lal was standing near his house at Munir Ahmad Khan Road when the gunmen riding a motorcycle shot him and fled. Lal died on the spot. Unidentified armed men gunned down a Hindu man in Quetta city of southwest Pakistan today, police said. Madan Lal was standing near his house at Munir Ahmad Khan [...]

India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests has decided to forbid the keeping of captive dolphins for public entertainment anywhere in the country.In a policy statement released Friday, the ministry advised state governments to reject any proposal to establish a dolphinarium “by any person / persons, organizations, government agencies, private or public enterprises that involves import, [...]

The public image of the Brahmins, for instance, is that of an affluent, pampered class. But is it so today? There are 50 Sulabh Shauchalayas (public toilets) in Delhi; all of them are cleaned and looked after by Brahmins (this very welcome public institution was started by a Brahmin). A far cry from the elitist [...]

An institute in Udupi trains purohits and is affiliated to Sanskrit university.This temple town, which has been acknowledged globally as the seat of dvaita philosophy (duality) has begun spreading tenets of Hindu rituals and its performance to the developed world. What was known till recently as ‘old-world knowledge’, has now started being a source of [...]

A Buddhist monk set himself on fire in Sri Lanka to protest the slaughter of cattle for their meat, authorities said Friday. It was the first attempt at self-immolation by a monk in that country. “Policemen near the temple doused the flames and rushed the monk to hospital,” a police spokesman said, according to AFP. [...]

In 1968, only six years after founding the AEPi chapter at his Long Island University campus, Steven Silberfein took one of the thousand names of the Hindu god Vishnu and became Sridhar Silberfein.A year later, the one-time Jewish fraternity brother escorted the Hindu teacher Swami Satchidananda to the stage at Woodstock to deliver an invocation [...]