last updated 31st July 2011

Kazakhstani online petition

Kazakhstani online petition

By Radha Mohan Dasa

Please visit http://www.krishnatemple.com NOW and click the link to the new petition, or go straight to the petition webpage:

http://harekrishna.epetitions.net

Please sign it soon as you can, and please tell as many people as you can about it.

Background: Workers and police arrived on 15th June at the village near Almaty, Kazakhstan, where the embattled Hare Krishna commune is based to demolish twelve more Hare Krishna-owned homes. “The houses were literally crushed into dust. By ten o’clock it was all over,” said ISKCON spokesperson Maksim Varfolomeyev.

The temple, which the devotees have been ordered to destroy, has not been touched but the devotees fear it could be the next target. Human rights activist Yevgeny Zhovtis is outraged at the continuing destruction. “The authorities are showing that they will do what they want, despite the international outrage at the earlier demolitions of Hare Krishna-owned homes.” He believes the local administration chief “doesn’t care about the political damage to Kazakhstan’s reputation – or to its desire to chair the OSCE.”

ys Radha Mohan das

Hare Krishna in Kazakstan:
http://servantoftheservant-ananda.blogspot.com/2008/11/hare-krishnas-in-kazakhstan.html
Kazak Edition of Bhagavad-gita presented to Srila Prabhupada.
This is now the 55th language in which Bhagavad-gita has been printed.

Read HERE how the original issue began in Kazakstan

Read HERE what the previous articles from November 2006 were

Iskcon Kazakstan
http://www.palaceofthesoul.com/news/index.php

PLEASE VISIT THIS PAGE
http://kazakhkrishna.com/en-main/

Kazakh
http://vedabase.net/kazakhstan/

LONDON, U.K., November 2, 2010: A major study by researchers at Macalester College, Minnesota, and the University of California, has proven that youngsters are less likely to succeed at school if their mothers return to work within a year of their birth.

Children of mothers who resume work during their first year of life end up faring worse in formal exams and show signs of being more disruptive, reports the Daily Mail. The child’s success was particularly affected if the mother’s work was full-time, the study spanning five decades found. The impact also varied dramatically according to class and whether the child was in a single-parent or two-parent household.

“Somewhat later employment (years two and three) appeared to be advantageous for children’s achievement,” it concluded. Working full-time during a child’s first year ­ rather than reduced hours or not at all ­ may increase the risk of a child developing behavioral problems, it also emerged.

The research was publicized on Monday by the Daycare Trust charity, which campaigns for affordable childcare and has called for mothers to be given a year’s paid parental leave.

ALIGARH, INDIA, November 13, 2010: Diabetes has reached epidemic proportions in the country and is increasing with “tsunamic” speed, a top expert of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) said here Saturday.

“More than 75 percent of heart attack patients are either diabetic or undiagnosed. A vast majority of patients undergoing renal dialysis and transplants have diabetes as the underlying cause,” said Prof. Jamal Ahmad, director, Centre of Diabetes and Endocrinology, J.N. Medical College, AMU. He said the country had 50 million diabetes patients, and more than 95 percent of the population suffers from some form of the disease.

“Early diagnoses and optimal management can significantly decrease the mortality associated with this dreaded disease,” he said. Listing out the various preventive steps, Prof. Ahmad said brisk walking for half-an-hour every day can significantly reduce its risk. He also advocated giving up smoking and alcohol, reducing salt and trans-fat intake (present in junk food) and switching to a vegetarian diet.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

INDIA, November 14, 2010: “My opting for Hinduism is not a religious gimmick,” says Julia Roberts with her usual self-confidence in a telephone chat with Ranjan Das Gupta. In London recently, the actress spoke about her recent “Eat, Pray, Love” and its success during the interview. “It is similar to a character of Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham. It’s about finding peace and tranquillity of mind in Hinduism, one of the oldest and respected religions of civilisation”.

The Pretty Woman’s Hindu faith is a private matter.

“I have no intention of demeaning any other religion simply because of my fondness for Hinduism. I don’t believe in comparing religions or human beings. A comparison is a very mean thing to do. I have received real spiritual satisfaction through Hinduism,” she says.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

PATNA, INDIA, October 14, 2010: Isn’t it a heartening news that Durga Puja committees have been sensitized against animal sacrifice? Ranjit Bhattacharya, a purohit (priest) of a Barowari Puja Committee said, “Sacrifice is an essential aspect of the Puja, for `bali’ is the symbol of power. Bali invokes power. And since we are worshipping Durga, who is the embodiment of shakti (power), it is essential to incorporate bali in puja. But it does not have to be an animal. Now most of the Puja committees prefer to use vegetables or fruits,” added the purohit.

Incidentally, even Bengali pandals here do not offer animal sacrifice to the Goddess. Bali made of white pumpkin, sugarcane and cucumber is offered specially on Mahaashtami day during sandhi pujan. An integral and important part of Durga Puja, sandhi puja is performed at the juncture of the 8th and 9th lunar days. Sandhi puja lasts from the last 24 minutes of Ashtami till the first 24 minutes of Navami.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

NEW DELHI, INDIA, September 29, 2010: : For a few months now, Bill and Melinda Gates and have been wining and dining with the world’s richest, gently persuading over 40 US billionaires to pledge at least half of their wealth to fix the world’s ills. But no one from has yet been able to match that generosity. Very few have even shown an inclination to do so.

At least one Indian billionaire, Shiv Nadar, has taken a first step and is now daring others of his ilk to start making a meaningful contribution to society. The technology czar has committed to put aside well over 10% of his wealth for philanthropic ventures. These ventures, under the Shiv Nadar Foundation, span building and running free schools, a proposed university and a museum of art.

Mr. Nadar has been influenced by the deep philanthropic resolve of the Gates couple and Buffett, the world’s richest people, both of whom have pledged almost their entire wealth for charity. “My wife and I spent a whole evening with them (Bill and Melinda) and we talked about this,” he says. “When Buffett dies, there will only be a stone. It shows a very different aspect of life, about people and how they care.”

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

Posted November 23, 2010 in Curbing Pollution, Solving Global Warming

While in the U.S. some political leaders unbelievably debate whether climate change is happening, India is looking ahead to how climate change will impact its rapidly growing economy.  India recently released the first-ever scientific study that assessed the impacts of climate change by 2030 on agriculture, health, water and forests and underscores India’s vulnerability to climate change – including extreme drought and monsoons, rapid sea level rise, and fluctuating rice and corn yields.

The timing of India’s climate report, just before the Cancun discussions, supports India’s recent efforts in increased cooperation on transparency and science.  The study is also important to meet India’s Copenhagen target to cut emissions intensity by 20 to 25 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels, and drive domestic climate actions while building a resilient, low carbon economy, as my colleague Jake Schmidt recently discussed here.

The report, “Climate Change and India: A 4 x 4 Assessment, A Sectoral and Regional Analysis for the 2030s,” assesses projected climate impacts in key areas of the Indian economy in four separate climatic regions of India (the Himalayas, the Western Ghats, coastal areas, and the Northeast).  In releasing the report, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh emphasized, “There is no country in the world that is as vulnerable, on so many dimensions, to climate change as India is.  We must continue this focus on rigorous climate change science.” The study also supports the need to take domestic and international action on both curbing emissions and preparing for climate disasters.

Key findings of the study are:

Overall Climate Change Projections - All of the four regions examined indicate an overall warming of 1.7-2.2 degrees Celsius, including extreme high and low temperatures by 2030.

Intense Precipitation - Rainfall and snowfall patterns are projected to increase and intensify in India, adding 5-10 annual days of extreme events in all four regions by 2030.

Sea Level Rise - Sea level rise in India has been increasing by 1.3 mm/year, which is consistent with IPCC projections and is anticipated to continue to rise; cyclones will intensify, while the number of cyclones decline.

Floods & Droughts - All four regions are expected to experience a 10-30 percent increase in the magnitude of flooding existing levels; droughts are expected in most of the regions with the Himalayan region experiencing moderate to extreme drought severity.

Crop Production - Rice, corn, and sorghum yields will fluctuate in India.  While a few areas are projected to see a modest (4 percent) increase in rice yields, others will see sharp declines (as high as 50 percent) in rice, corn, and sorghum yields.

Livestock - Cattle, pigs, goats and other livestock are all predicted to be highly vulnerable and stressed, including reduced milk production, as a result of increased temperatures, especially in the months of May and June.

Fisheries - Sardine and mackerel populations are likely to shift populations northward and some populations may increase overall yield.

Forests/Biodiversity - All of the four regions are vulnerable to climate change in the short term, with changes ranging from 8-56 percent in vegetation cover.

Human Health – Malaria and other vector-borne diseases are projected to spread to northern regions while the malaria transmission window may decline in coastal areas.

In a concluding “Way Forward” section, the report finds that India must continue to build its capacity to produce data on the impacts of climate change.  Specifically, it calls for improved data sharing between Indian institutions and agencies gathering relevant data.  It also outlines the need to increase systematic observations taking place over long periods, and to integrate more climate models into future studies.  Finally, it concludes that all regions will need detailed studies on impacts relevant to them, and that this could be done on a state-by-state basis.

The report is the second report by the Indian Network of Climate Change Assessment(INCCA), a network of over 120 institutions and 220 scientists formed last year to further Indian climate science. In May, my colleague Shravya Reddy blogged about INCCA’s first report, a comprehensive assessment of India’s 2007 greenhouse gas emissions, released in May of this year (see that report here).  INCCA’s next report, expected in May 2011, will examine the causes and impacts of black carbon in India.

India’s recent report shows an urgent need to move beyond studies and information sharing.  When our leaders meet in Cancun, the study shows that it is imperative for nations to work together to drive action at home and internationally to curb greenhouse gas emissions, protect our global economy from climate change, and build reliance in local communities against climate disasters.

Co-authored by Michael Thompson in New Delhi.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

The Rise of Mobile Indian Food
http://www.indiawest.com/readmore.aspx?id=2729&sid=6
 
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, December 16, 2010: Eight food trucks are already serving lunch on a business street in Santa Monica, Calif., on a recent Tuesday. Yet when India Jones Chow Truck cruises to the curb, a line forms quickly. Jason Shepley waits for his korma-dal-rice combo. "I just love this food; I am a regular." The Dosa Truck is parked, along with two others, on the UCLA campus. Students and staff amble over to grab a dosa or samosas and walk away with their lunches.
 
Sumant Pardal and Leena Deneroff, owners of the two businesses, respectively, serve Indian fare from their trucks at locations around Los Angeles to as many as 100 to 300 customers daily. The line, Pardal says, is sometimes 50-70 people deep.
 
The two are among a handful of "gourmet" mobile Indian eateries in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas that are part of the food truck phenomenon that has gripped metropolitan areas across the country in the last two years. Los Angeles, where their following is tremendous, has nearly 3,000 including 200-300 "gourmet trucks." These are a new generation of food trucks that serve ethnic and off-beat fare; most are traditional "taco trucks" serving burgers and Mexican food.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

When it comes to the sensitive topic of Varnashrama, or what many people call the caste system of India, we have seen so many talks over this issue, both  pro and con, back and forth, this way and that. We all know that the Vedic  system of Varnashrama has been mentioned in the Vedic literature in many  places. But it seems that many people still don't understand how it was meant to  be implemented. It is not because of Varnashrama, but because of this  misunderstanding of what it really is that has caused so many of India's social  problems. This article contains many quotes from Vedic shastra to clarify  what the Varnashrama or caste system is actually supposed to be. This article is for those more familiar with the topic, but for those who are  not we can explain briefly that there are four basic social divisions, namely  the Brahmanas (those who are priests, or interested in the study, teaching and  practice of spiritual knowledge and intellectual pursuits), Kshatriyas (those  who are soldiers, in the military, or police, politicians, managers, etc.),  Vaishyas (merchants, businessmen, bankers, farmers, tradesmen, etc.), and  Shudras (those who would rather engage in simple labor or employment, or  technicians, artists, poets, writers, musicians, etc.). Outcastes are those who  are outside these four because of their attraction to frivolous or reckless  actions. There are also the four ashramas of life, which include Brahmacharis  (student life, generally celibates), Grihastas (householders), Vanaprasthas  (those who are retired from family life), and Sannyasa (the renounced monks,  some of whom travel the world to teach). This is the Vedic system of  Varnashrama.
The modern caste system is seen to usually dictate one's varna or caste merely by one's birth family, as if one automatically inherits the caste of one's father, which is why there is a growing dislike for it. This is not the traditional Vedic system of Varnashrama. This is the difference and the problem. The traditional Vedic system calculated one's occupational class by recognizing one's natural talents, interests, tendencies, and abilities. It was  similar to the modern system of having high school counselors adjust a student's  academic courses by discussing with the students their interests in conjunction  with the results of their IQ tests. Thus, such counselors see what occupational  direction is best suited for the students so they can achieve a fitting career  that is of interest to them and helps them be a contributor to society at the  same time. And the four basic divisions of society, as outlined in the Vedic  system, are natural classifications and found everywhere, in every society, call  it what you want. Plus, the traditional Vedic Varnashrama system was never so inflexible that one could not change from one occupation or class to  another. The rigidity of the present-day caste system, based on jati or  one's birth family, is actually leading us away from the flexibility, and the  common sense, of the Vedic varna system.
For this reason, you could say that the modern caste system that we find today  is opposed to the Vedic system of varna. The Vedic process was a matter of bringing experience and wisdom of the ages to assist and direct a person's  life in what would be the most productive and satisfying occupation that would  fit the mentality, interests, talents, and level of consciousness of an  individual. It was never meant to dominate, stifle, hold down, or demean anyone.  Therefore, the caste system as we find it today should be thrown out, and the natural system of the Vedic Varnashrama should be properly understood as it was meant to be.
So, to show what I'm talking about, here in the shastric quotes that follow I  try to provide a clear description of how the varna system was never meant to be based merely on one's family birth, but by one's talents, natural interests, proclivities, expertise, and activities. These quotes are from the  Brahma Parva section of the Bhavishya Purana (abbreviated as BP), and no matter how much or how little credit you give to this Purana, you  still cannot deny the logic with which this information is presented.

HOW DO WE RECOGNIZE ONE’S VARNA?
First of all, how do we recognize one's varna is an ancient  question, even asked by the sages of the distant past to Lord Brahma. What is it  that really makes the difference between one person and the next? "The sages asked: O Lord Brahma, in the beginning of creation, how was one recognized as a Brahmana? Was it because of his birth in a particular family, his knowledge of  the Vedas, the characteristics of his body, his accomplishment of self-realization, his quality of behavior, or the prescribed duties he carried out? Is it the mind, speech, activities, body, or the qualities that determine one's social status? Surely one's birth in a certain caste [or family] is not sufficient for one to be recognized as a Brahmana. One's qualities and work must  also play an important part in determining a person's position in society. The  Vedic literature supports this view." (BP, 38.8-11)
"Different social orders, such as the Brahmanas and Kshatriyas (and others) are  directly seen, but simply being born in a particular family does not  automatically grant one his social status. An intelligent person can easily  recognize a horse in the midst of many cows. Similarly, among many who are born  in a particular social status, those who are actually qualified in terms of  character and activities can be easily recognized." (BP, 38.19-20)
"Some people say that all of humanity is the topmost caste, and there is nothing  more to be said than this. They fail to understand that the various purificatory  processes, such as the sacred thread ceremony [initiation into the twice-born  status], make a person distinct from those who do not undergo such rituals."  (BP, 38.21)
Such customs certainly help one progress and is recommended, but the fact  remains that in spite of such purificatory rites, we are all still very much the  same, as described next.

WE ARE ALL QUITE ALIKE
"How can all the living entities who take birth, grow old, become diseased, and  then die, who suffer the threefold miseries of material existence, who take  birth in innumerable species, such as human beings, birds, Shudras, dogs, pigs,  dog-eaters, insects, and tortoises, who are all placed into very awkward  conditions of life, fraught with danger, illness, lamentation, and distress, and  who are constantly being drowned by the burden of their grave sinful reactions,  be accepted as qualified Brahmanas?" (BP, 38.23-25)
Therefore, there must be some additional means that can help identify one's mental makeup and high or low level of intellect and consciousness.

IT IS ONLY OUR ACTIONS AND  QUALIFICATIONS THAT DIFFERENTIATE US
"Just as one can differentiate between a soldier, an elephant, a horse, a cow, a  goat, a camel, and an ass by seeing their colors and forms [as distinguished  because of their birth], all living entities have different characteristics and  duties that distinguish them from one another." (BP, 38.30)
"[However] the question, "Who is a Brahmana?" cannot be answered so easily.  Actually, there is no question of a person being qualified as a Brahmana simply  because he was born in a family of Brahmanas. When a person is designated as  belonging to one of the four divisions of the social order [whether it be  Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras or Brahmanas]—that [ddesignation] is not eternal.  There is no physical characteristic that enables one to determine who is a  Brahmana. A fair or dark complexion, which, after all, is temporary, is no real  indication of a person's varna." (BP, 38.31)

A CASTE SYSTEM BASED ON BIRTH IS UNJUST
"Therefore, the conception of a caste system based solely on birth is artificial  and temporary. It may seem to be reality, but that is only due to the influence  of the practice of a particular period. A businessman and doctor are both human  beings, but their profession is different. Their work is according to their  nature and qualities, and not because of the family they were born into."  (BP, 38.32)
"Can a person, thus, claim to be a Brahmana if he does not act according to the  codes of good conduct? Can a man claim to be a Kshatriya if he does not protect  the citizens? Can a person claim to be a Vaishya if he gives up performing his  prescribed duties [in business, trade or farming]? Can a person claim to be a  Shudra if he abandons service to the higher three classes?
"There is no physical difference between human beings as there is between cows  and horses. Actually, all living beings should be treated with respect, knowing  that they are one in quality as spirit souls, although they may temporarily have  different varieties of forms and activities." (BP, 38.33-34)
"Therefore, the caste system in human society that is based solely upon birth should be understood as superficial, because it is not prescribed in the scriptures. Unfortunately, those in ignorance cannot understand that it is a man-made concoction that can be easily refuted by a person in  knowledge." (BP, 38.35)
"If a person considers himself to be a Brahmana by birth but engages in [such  things as] taking care of cows, buffalos, goats, horses, camels, or sheep, or  acts as a messenger, tax collector, businessman, painter [artist], or dancer, he  should be considered as not a real Brahmana, even though he may be very expert  or powerful." (BP, 38.36-37)
"Brahmanas who have deviated from the path of righteousness as propagated by the  scriptures are to be considered fallen [from their social status], even though  they may belong to a very aristocratic family, and have performed all the  required purificatory rituals, and carefully studied the Vedas. No amount  of accomplishments gives one the right to justify sinful behavior."(BP,  38.42-43)
"Thus, it can be understood how a Brahmana can become a Shudra, a Shudra can  become a Brahmana, a Kshatriya can become a Brahmana or a Vaishya, and so on."  (BP, 38.47)
Herein we can understand that a Brahmana is no Brahmana if he is not endowed with purity and good character, or if he leads a life of frivolity and immorality. However, a Shudra is a Brahmana if he leads a virtuous and pious life. Varna or caste is a question of character. Varna is not the  color of the skin, but the color of one's character and quality. Conduct and character is what matters and not lineage alone. If one is Brahmana by birth and, at the same time, if he possesses the virtues of a Brahmana, that it is extremely good, because it is only certain virtuous qualifications that determine if one is a Brahmana, just as certain qualities distinguish one as a Kshatriya, Vaishya or Shudra. But if a Brahmana does not have the necessary traits, then he cannot call himself a Brahmana.
"Brahma said: If study of the Vedas is an important criteria for being recognized as a Brahmana, then many Kshatriyas and Vaisyas also deserve to be called Brahmanas, just as Ravana became known as a demon [by qualities and actions]. Similarly, there are many dog-eaters, laborers, hunters, fishermen,  sailors, and other people [outside the higher classes] who study the Vedas… Therefore, mere study of the Vedas cannot be the criteria for determining a person's social position." (BP, 39.1-2, 6)
The point is that "One who is twice-born and has thoroughly studied the Vedas, along with its six branches, cannot claim to be a purified soul if  he does not observe the codes of good conduct. It is the occupational duty of  one who is twice-born to study the Vedas, and this is one of the symptoms  of a genuine Brahmana. If a person does not perform his prescribed duties after  studying the four Vedas, he is like a eunuch who cannot take advantage of  having a wife." (BP, 39.8-9)
Here again we see that the proper classification of an individual is not the status of one's birth family, but the qualities that he shows in life.
Otherwise, even someone who considers himself to be a sophisticated Brahmana may  indeed be something far less. As it is further explained: "Just like a Brahmana,  a Shudra can have a shikha, chant Om, worship the deities every morning and  evening, wear a sacred [Brhamana's] thread, carry a staff, and wear a deerskin  [like a forest sage]. Even Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva are incapable of preventing  people from becoming Shudras, and so what to speak of human beings. Therefore,  wearing a sacred thread, keeping a shikha, and dressing a particular way are not  really indications of a person's position within the Varnashrama society. Who  can stop a person's Shudra mentality, even though he may be well-versed in the  Vedic mantras and tantras, and is a very good speaker on these subjects?"  (BP, 39.10-13)
"[Generally it can be recognized that] All classes of men are seen to be capable  of performing austerities, speaking the truth, worshiping the demigods, and  chanting mantras. All classes of men generally avoid and [in some cases] even  deceive those who speak harshly. Considering this, it is not possible to  actually differentiate between a Brahmana and a Shudra. The power to curse and  the exhibition of compassion can also be found in Shudras. One cannot ascertain  from a person's external appearance whether he is a thief, a cheater, or a  prince. Just as a Shudra is incapable of relieving himself of his miseries and  protecting his family, it is the same for a Brahmana."(BP, 39.14-17)

THE DAMAGE OF UNQUALIFIED BRAHMANAS
"It is better if there are no Brahmanas at all than to have sinful and unqualified Brahmanas in the kingdom [who thus mislead society by what they say and do], especially in Kali-yuga, because in previous ages such Brahmanas would have been censored." (BP, 39.18)
Furthermore, it is especially difficult in these days to find anyone who is  eligible to be considered a member of the higher classes or varnas of  society, for it seems that everyone is materially motivated.
"According to some opinion, the power to curse others, a compassionate nature,  and an inclination toward spiritual life are the characteristics of a Brahmana.  In spite of that, it is seen that practically everyone is attached to worldly  activities, having fallen into the darkness of ignorance, and because of that  they are helplessly rushing towards hell, just like flies rush towards a fire."  (BP, 39.19-20)

SO WHO IS A REAL BRAHMANA?
We have now seen by the logic presented in the Bhavishya Purana how the jati or birth of an individual does not justify anyone's social classification. But also how many of those who take pride in considering  themselves of a higher caste or varna are actually not qualified in such  a way at all. And yet, even a low-class person, meaning having taken birth from  a lower social class, can indeed rise up to be a Brahmama. It all depends on  one's level of consciousness, which generally depends on one's training and then mental disposition towards a spiritual life, and his natural inclination to  follow a code of good conduct.
"Only those who have been PROPERLY trained and who have studied the Vedas  [are seen to generally] adhere to a life of piety, whereas those without  training [in at least general moral standards], who have not studied the  Vedas [nor their spiritual conclusion] must engage in sinful activities.  Because study of the Vedas is the primary duty of a Brahmana [or one who  is seriously on the path to spiritual progress, thus showing Brahminical  qualities], one who does not study the Vedas cannot be considered a  genuine Brahmana." (BP, 39.25-26)
This is interesting because how many times have we met people who feel they have  duly studied the Vedic conclusions but have yet to know how to apply them, nor  have they continued to follow them, giving any number of excuses for their  present activities. The above verses make it clear that one has to continue to  follow the standards, and if he cannot, then he is no longer to be accepted as a  person of a higher social class. And this can go for anyone and anywhere. If  they have little respect for others, engage in materialistic pursuits without  higher moral standards, then that person is someone with a low consciousness, or  low varna.

A BRAHMANA CAN EASILY FALL DOWN, WHILE A SHUDRA CAN EASILY RISE UP
"A Brahmana can easily be diverted from his brahminical qualities and codes of  good conduct if he becomes bewildered by desires for material enjoyment and  blinded by pride, just like an ordinary materialistic person. Of course, anyone  becomes degraded and goes to hell if he has a sinful nature, even after  undergoing the samskaras. On the other hand, those who observe proper  etiquette, even though they might not have undergone the samskaras, should be considered as Brahmanas.
"It is a fact that even someone who chants various mantras and has undergone all  the purificatory rituals may fall down into illusion and thereby become bereft  of brahminical qualifications due to his sinful mentality. People who engage in  abominable activities, and who are blinded by pride in their ability, fall down  from their position and lose all brahminical qualities." (BP,  40.15-18)
Here again I am reminded of what I have always said, that the present caste system based on one's jati or birth is unjust. It is meant to depend on  the person's natural talents, abilities, tendencies, and mentality, which varies  from person to person regardless of family, social class, culture, regional  jurisdiction, etc. Each person has to be considered individually regardless of  family background.
"The caste system based simply on birth does not actually divide people according to their development of consciousness. It is one's envy and hatred that allows us to place a person in a higher or lower category. If it is not  helpful to divide people according to their bodily characteristics, [then why do  so]? In the past, many great sages, such as Srila Vyasadeva, observed proper  etiquette and became great souls, although they did not undergo the  samskaras, such as the garbhadhana.â€? (BP, 40.19-20)
For example, "Vyasadeva  was the son of a fisherman's daughter, his father Parashara was born from a  woman who was a dog-eater. Shukadeva was born from a female parrot, Vashishtha  was the son of a prostitute…" and others sages like Kanada, Shringi,. Mandapala,  and Mandavya all had questionable births, and yet all were highly qualified  Brahmanas, and recognized as such.
"Indeed, it is imperative that one strictly follow the instructions of these  highly qualified sages, who all possess a spotless character, if one hopes to  achieve success in life.
"O King, undergoing the various samskaras certainly plays an important part in raising one to the platform of a qualified Brahmana, but there are many other important considerations. For example, the great sage Shringi achieved the  status of a Brahmana on the strength of his austerities. It must be concluded  that undergoing samskaras is a principal criteria for becoming a  Brahmana. Still, on the strength of their penance and austerity, Vyasadeva,  Parashara, Kanada, Vashishtha, and Mandapala became qualified Brahmanas, despite  their taking birth from the womb of a fisherwomen, female dog-eater, or  prostitute, etc.
"[Therefore] undergoing the various samskaras is not sufficient to  qualify one as a Brahmana. Those who are expert in performing the Vedic and  tantrik samskaras require the attainment of transcendental knowledge and  the performance of penance to support their claim of being qualified Brahmanas.  Without such qualifications, one will certainly indulge in sinful activities and  thus fall from his high position as a Brahmana. One who is a Brahmana in name  only is not really a Brahmana." (BP, 40.22-32)
Here in these quotations we can see that many great Rishis were  born in lower varnas, such as Vashishta was the son of a prostitute;  Vyasa was born of a fisher woman; Parashara's mother was a chandala; Nammalwar  was a Shudra. Similarly, Valmiki, Viswamitra, Agastya were Brahmanas in spite of  their non-Brahmana origin. In more recent times, for example, Swami Vivekananda,  one of the most revered Hindus worldwide, and was a non-Brahmana. All this  proves that birth is not a major player in attaining the status of Brahmana.
It  is the intellectual and spiritual level that differentiates people. In the same way, spiritual realization is not dependent on birth  or book-learning, as has been repeatedly demonstrated in the lives of saints,  from the very earliest times to our own day. So, then who is a real rishi? It is  the person who has attained through proper means the direct realization of  Dharma. That is the one who can be a rishi even if he is a  non-Brahmana or mleccha by birth.
The basis of varna is guna or the mode of nature  in which a person is situated, and not birth. Therefore, one is a Brahmana not  because of one's birth or caste or heredity or color or profession or  acquisition of worldly knowledge, or mere observation of social and moral codes, but because of his spiritual  knowledge and insight, and his abidance in the Supreme Reality, his state of  self-realization. This is the conclusion of all Vedas, Shrutis,  Puranas, Itihasas, and of all great men of India.
Therefore, casteism, meaning judging a person by one's birth  family, is a misguided social custom and not part of any spiritual tradition,  and all our great preachers have tried to break it down. From Buddhism  downwards, every sect has preached against caste.

WHEN A BRAHMANA BECOMES LOWER THAN A  SHUDRA
"According to Svayambhuva Manu, the principal characteristic of a Brahmana is  that he possesses spiritual knowledge, is enriched with the power of penance,  and maintains a state of purity. According to this understanding, anyone,  whether he belongs to an upper, middle, or lower caste, if he never indulges in  sinful activities, he must be considered a Brahmana. It is said that an honest  and well-behaved Shudra is better than an arrogant Brahmana, and a Brahmana who  disregards the prescribed codes of good conduct is inferior to a Shudra. A  Shudra that does not keep wine in his shop or in his house is called an honest  Shudra." (BP, 42.29-32)

HOW EVERYONE CAN ADVANCE
The proper observance of the Vedic system of  Varnashrama-dharma is to help one's growth and self-evolution. The great  sages have explained that this system of division into varnas is the  stepping-stone to civilization, providing a means so one can rise higher and  higher in proportion to one's learning and culture. Such is our ideal for  raising all humanity slowly and gently towards the realization of the great  ideal of being a spiritual man, who is calm, steady, worshipful, pure, and  meditative. In that ideal there is God-realization.
The additional aim of Varnashrama-dharma is to promote  the development of the universal, eternal Sanatana-dharma, the balanced  state of being in which you perceive and live according to your genuine  spiritual identity. Thus, as the saying goes, "if you take care of  Dharma, Dharma will take care of you."
If you destroy it, society  will become bereft of balance. Therefore, we should never destroy our  Dharma. This principle holds true of the individual as much as of the  nation. It is Dharma alone which keeps a nation alive and moving forward.  Dharma is the very soul of man. Dharma is the very soul of a  nation also, even the world. So how can we all move forward together on the sure  path of progress? Here it is explained as follows:
"Brahminical prowess progressively increases in pious persons who cultivate  godly qualities such as forgiveness, control of the senses, compassion, charity,  truthfulness, purity, meditation, respect for others, simplicity, satisfaction,  freedom from false ego, austerity, self-control, knowledge, freedom from the  propensity to blaspheme others, celibacy, cultivation of knowledge, freedom from  envy, faithfulness, freedom from hatred, detachment, renunciation of the thirst  for material enjoyment, service to the spiritual master, and control of the  body, mind, and speech." (BP, 42.12-15)
"Many persons in the past became highly advanced and powerful by cultivating  these qualities and practicing behavior befitting a saintly person. It is a fact  that by such a practice, the heart becomes purified, freeing one from the  influence of the modes of passion [raja-guna] and ignorance [tamo-guna]." (BP, 42.16)
"According to learned authorities, those who possess these godly qualities are  actually scholars of the Vedas and Puranas, and understand the  confidential purport of the Bhagavad-gita. By faithfully following the  principles of varna and ashrama, people in all four yugas  have attained the perfection of life." (BP, 42.17-18)

CLASSIFICATIONS BASED ON THE BODY ARE COMPLETELY FALSE
By now we should be able to see that even a person who has taken birth from a family who has been considered of a low varna can raise him or herself up to a higher classification by having proper training and showing appropriate codes of conduct and lifestyle.
"When a Shudra has become advanced by undergoing the [Vedic] samskaras,  he can no longer be considered a Shudra. The conclusion is that a person's  external dress or appearance cannot be the criterion for his being accepted as a  Brahmana." (BP, 39.29)
However, the samskaras or rituals and training in themselves cannot be  the sole means of determining one's social position. This certainly helps, but  there must be more than that, which, as already explained.
"If the undergoing of samskaras is the main criteria for being accepted  as a Brahmana, then all those who have undergone samskaras are certainly
Brahmanas. If that be the case, how can they be compared with personalities like Srila Vyasadeva, who did not undergo the samskaras. If we consider this,  we see that there is no support for the theory of different castes. Although different castes are recognized in society, this is just an artificial  conception of materialistic people. The material body is composed of the five  gross elements—earth, water, fire, air, and sky. These elements cannnot be the  cause for one being accepted as a Brahmana [or anything else], because they  combine for some time and then merge back into their source. Indeed, the body of  an atheist, mleccha, or a yavana is made of the same material  elements. [Thus, such designations based on the body are completely false]."(BP, 39.30-33)
"Religiosity as described in the Vedas can also be found in people who  are sinful, violent, of bad character, and cruel. Therefore the determination of  one's social status does not depend on undergoing [purificatory]  samskaras." (BP, 39.34)
"Therefore, [from the conclusions that have been presented so far] there is no  difference between a Brahmana and a Shudra in terms of bodily features,  mentality, experience of happiness and distress, opulence, prowess, tendency  toward gambling, shrewdness in business, ability to earn wealth, steadiness,  restlessness, intelligence, detachment, virtue, accomplishment of the three  objectives of life [dharma, artha and kama], cleverness,  beauty, complexion, sexual capacity, stool, bones, holes of the body,  manifestations of love, height, weight, and bodily hair. Therefore, even if the  demigods were to try very hard to find distinctions between Brahmanas and  Shudras [and everyone in between] in this way, they would not be able to do so."  (BP, 39.35-39)
"One should not think that all Brahmanas are white like moon rays, that all Kshatriyas have a complexion like the color of a kimsuka flower, that all  Vaishyas have a golden complexion like the color of an orpiment fruit, and that  all Shudras are black like half-burnt coal. How can there be four classes of  human beings when their walking, complexion, hair, happiness, distress, blood,  skin, flesh, bone marrow, and fluids are totally identical? There is nothing  special about anyone's complexion, height, weight, figure, period of stay within  the womb, speech, wisdom, working senses, life-air, strength, illnesses,  objectives of life, and methods for curing diseases." (BP, 39.41-43)
"A father may have four sons and it is assumed that all of them belong to the  same caste as their father. Similarly, all living entities are produced by the  one Supreme Father and so, how can His children be divided into different  castes? Just as the color, texture, structure, feel, and juice of different  portions of a fig are the same, so are the human beings that are emanating from  one source, and so it is improper to differentiate between them. The brothers,  children, daughters-in-law, births, marriages, beauty, complexion, and artistic  ability must be the same for the member of the lineages [or gotras]  coming from Kaushika, Gautama, Kaumdinya, Mandavya, Vashishtha, Atreya, Kautsa,  Angirasa, Maudgalya, Katyayana, and Bhargava.
"Although some learned scholars accept the material body as being a Brahmana [or  something else], this indicates that they are in the bodily concept of life  [without spiritual perception], which exists in a condition of dense ignorance.  This is like a blind person desiring to treat others' eyes by applying a black  ointment. Both are ludicrous. Because the material body has a beginning, it also  has an end. After death, the elements of the body merge into the totality of  material elements once again. Therefore, the body [alone] cannot be accepted as  a Brahmana [or any other varna]." (BP, 39.45-51)
In conclusion, therefore, "Only ignorant people accept this material body as  being a Brahmana. According to their understanding, the position of being a  Brahmana cannot be achieved simply by undergoing the various purificatory  processes." (BP, 39.54)

ONE MISSES GOAL OF LIFE WHEN PREOCCUPIED BY  CASTE
"If after attaining the human form of life, which enables one to possess things  like attractive bodily features, abundant wealth, great power and prestige, one  does not live according to the prescribed religious principles, it cannot be  predicted what species of life he will thereafter be forced to accept on various  planets. This is the fate of one who is so proud that he dares to challenge the  supremacy of God. Being intoxicated by pride, thinking that their caste, race,  beauty, social status, and education are very wonderful, people do not bother to  understand their actual self-interest, and because of that in their next life  they will suffer like eunuchs.
"Material existence can be compared to a huge pit in which thousands of millions  of living entities are drowning. Knowing this perfectly well, which intelligent  person would be very proud of his caste?
"There are many human beings who are presumed to be fully satisfied, having been  born in aristocratic families, and yet because of their own misdeeds, after  death they will be forced to take birth in this world in some lower species of  life. In this world, no one can remain permanently in some situation." (BP, 39.3-6)
If this does not make it clear regarding the impermanent nature of the living  being, and that even one's high, intermediate or low birth is temporary, then I  do not know what can. Yet, we see that so many people are going through life,  completely asleep in regard to the real purpose of this existence. Thus, they  may think their present position is so grand, not knowing that if they do not  use this life properly for real spiritual progress, after death their next life  may not be very great at all. But how many times must we go through this before  we learn our lessons about the real truth of the matter, that our real position  is as a spiritual being, beyond the body and its superficial designations, and  everything else is temporary and secondary?

THE DIFFERENCE OF PROPER CONSCIOUSNESS AND  INTENT, OR MERELY GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS
In the next few verses it is pointed out that a person must also have the proper  concentration and focus, along with the proper intentions in their actions if  they are expected to be qualified in their positions. Otherwise, it is seen that  anyone can chant mantras and do rituals, but merely going through the motions,  especially for adoration, profit and distinction, is not what is needed to  suitably accept or be qualified for a higher status in one's social  classification.
"Generally, those who are twice-born—the Brahmanas, Kshatriiyas, and  Vaishyas—undergo all the Vedic samskaras. For this reason, they aree  certainly to be considered as superior to the Shudras who engage in all kinds of  frivolous activities.
"In spite of undergoing the samskaras, if those who are twice-born engage  in violent and sinful activities, such as killing a Brahmana [or worse], having  sexual intercourse with the wife of the spiritual master, stealing, killing a  cow, drinking wine, cheating, speaking lies, exhibiting great pride, speaking  atheistic philosophy, blaspheming the Vedas, denying the authority of the  Vedas, plundering the wealth of others, acting whimsically, earning money  by dancing or cheating, eating all types of abominable food, and performing any  other prohibited activity with the body, mind, and speech, they can never be  considered purified, even if they perform thousands of sacrifices [rituals].
"Therefore, the ability to chant mantras, perform fire rituals, practice penance, and sacrifices does not make one a Brahmana, just as a Shudra remains a  Shudra, despite the ability to perform all these activities [when merely going  through the motions]." (BP, 41.5-9)
"Similarly, the Brahmanas who indulge in sinful activities must be considered  fallen. Therefore, the only sane conclusion is that the concepts of Brahmana and  Kshatriya etc., are temporary designations and not ultimate reality."  (BP, 41.52)

EXPECTED CHARACTERISTICS AND ACTIONS OF EACH PERSON OF THE FOUR VARNAS
What follows are a very few of the qualities, actions and characteristics that  are typical of people in each of the four varnas.  "Brahma said: Genuine Brahmanas know very well what is to be  accepted and what is to be rejected. They avoid sinful behavior, carefully  control their senses, mind, and speech, and carefully observe the prescribed  etiquette.
They follow the rules and regulations that are prescribed for them in  the scriptures, and constantly work for the welfare of others.  They work  for the protection of religious principles in this world and are fixed in  trance, meditating on the Absolute Truth. They restrain their anger, and are  free from material attachment, envy, lamentation, and pride. They are attached  to the study of the Vedas [and their supporting literature], very  peaceful, and are the best well-wishing friends of all living entities. They are  equal in happiness and distress, reside in a solitary place, observe all the  vows prescribed for them with their body and mind, and are pious by nature. They  are reluctant to perform any abominable act, and are freed from illusion and  false pride. They are charitable, compassionate, truthful, and very learned in  the scriptures. They know the Supreme Brahman and have high regard for the  revealed scriptures." (BP, 42.1-7)
From this verse we can understand that if a Brahmana is not free from such things as anger, material attachment, envy, lamentation, and pride, along with  the other qualities mentioned above, then such people do not have the real  mentality of a Brahmana, even if they do appear to have some expertise in other  areas. Thus, they are not genuinely qualified to be spiritual authorities for  the rest of society, but, indeed, have much more work to do on themselves for  their own progress and development.
Another class of beings are also known as Brahmanas, as explained: "Brahma was  born from the navel of the purusha-avatara [Vishnu]. All living entities  were manifested by Him, and among them, those who are devotees, surrendered  souls unto that Supreme Personality of Godhead, are also known as Brahmanas."  (BP, 42.9)
Furthermore, "Those who have some realization of the Supreme Brahman, and who  act according to the prescribed codes of good conduct, are called Brahmanas, and  they are glorified by the other members of society." (BP, 42.11) In regard to the other main varnas, namely the Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and  Shudras, their expected standards are also described: "Those who give protection  to others, saving them from all kinds of danger, are known as Kshatriyas. Those  who engage in farming, cow protection, and trading are known as Vaishyas, and  those who have no capacity to study the Vedas [or deep spiritual  knowledge], and are engaged in serving members of the higher three classes are  known as Shudras." (BP, 42.10)
"Lord Brahma has prescribed the methods for members of all the varnas  that will enable them to achieve perfection by performing their respective  duties.
"Among the human beings, those who are comparatively more powerful and are thus  able to give protection to others, saving them from all types of danger, should  be known as Kshatriyas. Persons who approach the Kshatriyas to beg some charity  after instructing them on the messages of the Supreme Lord as found in the Vedic  literature should be known as Brahmanas.
"Those who are almost as powerful as the Kshatriyas but engage in agriculture,  cow protection, and trade [such as banking and business], should be known as  Vaishyas. Those who, not very capable of working independently, and who are  easily overcome by lamentation and illusion, should engage in the service of the  higher three classes of men and thus be known as Shudras. In this way, according  to their nature and qualities, there are prescribed duties for Brahmanas,  Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras." (BP, 42.19-24) "The qualities of a Brahmana are peacefulness, austerity, self-control, purity,  tolerance, simplicity, knowledge, the practical application of the knowledge,  and inquiry into the nature of the Absolute Truth. Heroism, power,  determination, resourcefulness, courage in battle, generosity and leadership are  the natural qualities of work for the Kshatriyas. Farming, cow protection and  business are the natural work for the Vaishyas, and for the Shudras there is  labor and service to others." (BP, 42.25-27)  In this way, everyone has a natural tendency for some aspect of the  particular traits described, and are also a part of the social body of  civilization to help contribute to its balance and progress, and the well-being  of one and all.

IN CONCLUSION
If people can understand the real basis of the Varna  system, and be trained in acting accordingly, raising themselves to their  original spiritual level, then the false, superficial and bodily based sectarian  spirit can ultimately be put to rest. Then there is every possibility that such  people can develop a spiritual vision of one another with a mood of love, care,  cooperation, sacrifice, and service. This is the real purpose of the  Varna system anyway, to see that everyone is a part of the larger social  body, and that each person, by their actions and occupation, has a contribution  to make to the well-being of all.
"It is therefore to be concluded that humanity is essentially one, but distinctions of caste have been made according to a person's qualities and work [mentality and consciousness]. As far as general behavior is concerned, the  entire human race is one. There is only a difference in people's occupations and  attitudes. Those who divide society into castes according to birth cannot see  that human beings are essentially one." (BP, 42.33-34)
Another article of mine on my website that can help provide more clarity is Casteism: Is It the Scourge of  Hinduism, or the Perversion of a Legitimate Vedic System?_ (http://www.stephen-knapp.com/casteism.htm )
[This article is  available at: http://www.stephen-knapp.com/ ]

Britain's changing ethnic map: how suburbia has been transformed

Migrant communities are on the move, driven by rising affluence and aspirations, a new analysis for the Observer concludes ahead of the census results. Now other arrivals are beginning the process of establishing themselves
Jamie Doward and Justine Pemberton
The Observer,Sunday 10 April 2011

Every day, shortly before noon, the holy men in saffron robes perform the same ceremony. Watched by scores of people sitting cross-legged on pristine marble floors, they bang small cymbals and wave candles while chanting incantations to statues of Hindu gods.

Any visitor to their temple, one of the largest in the world, could not fail to be awed by the spectacle. But the Shri Swaminarayan Mandir is a temple built on superlatives. Everyone from Princess Diana to Jimmy Carter has paid a visit. On 27 October 2000 it broke a world record by serving 1,247 vegetarian dishes to mark the start of the Hindu new year.

The temple, however, is not in Bengal or Kerala. It is in suburban north-west London, in Neasden, where it nestles incongruously near rows of Edwardian terraces. The site was chosen partly because of the region's large number of Hindus, many of whom arrived from Uganda after being expelled by Idi Amin in the 1970s.

As Yogesh Patel, a spokesman for the temple, acknowledges, the suburb was attractive to Hindu migrants because of "better employment prospects … the choice of good schools and business opportunities".

The temple, which has a highly successful independent school, is testimony to something significant happening in Britain, a shift that has been occurring largely without notice. Second- and third-generation migrant communities are on the move, driven by increasing affluence and aspiration. "We are seeing an emerging segment of dynamic young professionals, successful entrepreneurs and ambitious, resourceful wealth creators, all giving back to our country, enriching it economically, socially, culturally," Patel said.

Increasingly, younger generations believe their futures lie in the suburbs. The extent of this trend will emerge with greater clarity once the results of this year's census are published. But an exhaustive analysis of Britain's ethnic minorities, carried out for theObserver by Experian, the data-mining company, paints a vivid picture of the impact they are having on regions where once they were notably absent.

Experian's Mosaic database tracks almost 50 million people in Britain via their surnames. The names are then matched to postcodes, allowing the social mobility of immigrant groups to be tracked. "In the old days you would see these groups conspicuously settling in inner-city areas," said Professor Richard Webber, who developed the database, "but you can now see how most groups have suburbanised themselves."

Experian's data confirms the hypothesis. In London suburbs of the sort that are dominated by 1930s-built semi-detached housing, there can now be found high concentrations of Sri Lankans in the south (New Malden, Mitcham), Sikhs in the west (Southall, Hounslow), Hindu Indians in the north-west (Wembley, Harrow) and Greek Cypriots in the north (Southgate, Palmers Green).

According to Webber, these are minority groups who have traditionally sought to acquire their own homes. As their economic circumstances have improved, they have moved outwards.

Contrary to common stereotypes, the data suggests that many members of immigrant communities live in relatively prestigious neighbourhoods. Mosaic found that, if you live in the highest-status neighbourhoods, your chances of having a Jewish or Armenian name are five times the national average.

Many other groups – notably Greek Cypriots, Iranians and Japanese – are also over-represented in these neighbourhoods. Almost one in four people in Harrow now have a Hindu Indian surname. By contrast, people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origins are far more likely to live in poorer neighbourhoods, as are Albanians, black Africans and Vietnamese.

The findings suggest that Britain is also becoming more diverse. The fastest growth has been among minorities who in 2006 were small in number, with the proportion of Slovakians rising by 977% and Lithuanians by 582%.

There has also been rapid growth of black South Africans and Zimbabweans and of people from the former French west African colonies, such as Ivory Coast and Mali. The number of adults with Nigerian and Ghanaian names has doubled.

By contrast, the growth in the number of adults from traditional centres of UK immigration, such as the West Indies, India and Pakistan, has been much lower. Some immigrant streams, from countries such as Vietnam, Laos and Mauritius, have almost ceased.

Areas that have seen the greatest rise in the number of people with Mandarin Chinese names are around universities, reflecting the surge in students from mainland China.

Over the same period, there was a 13.5% fall in the number of adults with Anglo-Saxon names living in smarter, private flats and a decline of 12.5% in the same group living in council flats. Conversely, there were increases in the proportion of people from eastern Europe and Africa and of the Hindu and Muslim religions in both types of housing.

Tim Butler, professor of geography at King's College London, and co-author with Chris Hamnett of Ethnicity, Class and Aspiration: Understanding London's New East End, recently carried out studies in five regions in the east of the capital.

"Among Asian groups, and particularly Indians, there was a desire to move out from inner London boroughs to outer London boroughs, particularly Redbridge. There were two main reasons for that: one was the attraction of suburban housing and the other was the high-quality schooling that met their aspirations. Many had been settled in the East End of London for possibly two to three generations and had themselves been to a local university and were keen for their children to get into one of the professions."

The trend has had some unusual consequences. New Malden in south London, with an adult population of 23,000, now has the largest expatriate community of South Koreans in Europe. Some estimates suggest that there are as many as 8,000 South Koreans living in the district, whose high street boasts at least 20 Korean businesses.

Tesco has said it sells more fruit and vegetables in New Malden per head of population than anywhere else in Britain, and attributes this to local enthusiasm for healthy food.

"When the embassy came over here [to nearby Wimbledon] in the 1970s, many followed suit," said one South Korean shopkeeper. "They found houses in New Malden because suburban areas had cheaper properties and good travel opportunities into London. Gradually, their friends and families came over and gathered here."

But it was in the early 1990s that things really took off. "Many bankers and financiers came to New Malden, attracted to the area for the same reason," the shopkeeper said. "Around 2,000 South Korean students came here because the education is very good."

A minister at the local Methodist church acknowledged that the presence of a large ethnic minority had created tensions. But, she said, the World Cup of 2002 had provided an unlikely opportunity for greater harmony. "South Korea was playing and there were massive celebrations. They were parading up and down the street, singing and shouting, everything.

"But then, later on, in the early hours of the morning, they came down and cleaned the streets, even picking up the tiniest cigarette butt. And that so impressed the rest of the community. Not only do they celebrate politely, they clean up after themselves."

New Malden is also home to a large Sri Lankan community, with many working in local care homes. Almost 6% of New Malden's population now has a Sri Lankan surname.

The Methodist minister said while both groups were very different, they were united in their hopes for the next generation. "They put more effort into transforming their communities and enabling their children to aspire to the positions that they had in their home countries, but haven't had here."

Admittedly the migrant aspiration to escape the inner city is nothing new. "Think about Brick Lane," said Sarah Mulley, associate director of the IPPR thinktank. "You've had successive migrant groups moving into the inner city and then, when they are established, moving out to be replaced by another migrant group. You've had French Huguenots, Jews, Bangladeshis. They arrive and then disperse."

But changes to immigration policy suggest that the shift to more affluent suburbs will become more pronounced. "Restricted immigration regimes mean migrant workers entering the UK are more likely to be highly paid and highly skilled," Mulley said.

"People are now coming to do a specific, professional job, which means they are concentrated in particular areas that are increasingly outside London. The profiles of those communities are changing."

By Jatindra Dash | IANS – Sun, May 1, 2011 10:45 AM IST

Bhubaneswar, May 1 (IANS) Two Indian scientists have questioned reports that the long elusive sub-atomic Higgs boson or the 'god particle' - a hypothetical particle believed to be a basic building block of matter - has been discovered, with one even denying the possibility of its physical existence.

B.G. Sidharth, director of the B.M. Birla Science Centre at Hyderabad, and Syed Afsar Abbas, professor at the physics department of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), expressed scepticism over the internal memo at CERN facility near Geneva that one of the Large Hadron Colliders (LHC) there had picked up signals that could indicate the Higgs boson.

'This is unofficially leaked news - such a thing has happened before,' Sidharth, who has authored several books and published research papers on particle physics and cosmology, told IANS.

Abbas, who has conducted research in particle and nuclear physics and cosmology, said similar claims of discovery of the Higgs boson were made earlier by Fermilab (in the US) where the Tevatron machine is engaged in a similar search, but later withdrawn.

CERN is the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

'This new claim appears to be of similar nature. Basing serious judgments on such dubious claims is unscientific,' Abbas told IANS.

Bosons are small elementary particles (which cannot be subdivided into smaller particles) 'carrying' forces of nature such as electro-magnetism and the strong and weak attraction in an atom's nucleus.

The 'Standard Model' of particle physics seeks to explain these forces through the interactions of photons and W and Z bosons with other elemental particles like electrons, quarks and others.

But it is not known what gives the W and Z bosons their mass.

In the 1960s, British physicist Peter Higgs developed the Higgs mechanism - visualising a sort of lattice filling the universe, which lends mass through a particle moving through it.

But for mathematical reasons, the giant masses of W and Z raise inconsistencies in the Standard Model. To address this, physicists contend that there must be at least one other particle - the Higgs boson.

While there is much evidence for the Higgs mechanism, attempts are on to prove the existence of the Higgs boson by Fermilabs and CERN, but no success has been reported yet.

According to Abbas, the Higgs boson does not exist.

Referring to a mathematical structure that he said he has proved in 1999, Abbas said the Standard Model actually does not allow Higgs to exist as a 'particle'.

'I had shown that the Higgs mechanism is basic and fundamental to the Standard Model. The Higgs mechanism produces mass in the Standard Model. It quantizes electric charge in the Standard Model and does all other things, which make the Standard Model so successful.'

Higgs is the 'vacuum' which does all the above things but does not exist as a physical particle, he said.

'My idea is well-known to all the particle physicists. But they tend to play down its importance as they have been spending billions of dollars of public money to look for this non-existent Higgs particle,' he claimed.

'However, ultimately, whether my picture is right or they are right will be decided by these experiments. I say look for it and you will not find it. I am right up to now as the Higgs particle has not been found,' he said.

Sidharth is, however, more open to the theory of the Higgs boson.

'It is not that I disapprove the Higgs boson theory, but there are alternative approaches, like the String Theory (which seeks to reconcile quantum theory and general relativity). There is also my own model based on what is called the non-commutative spacetime,' he said.

He said he had come out with new theoretical findings indicating a new force of nature in the cosmos apart from matter and anti-matter. This force operates between a particle and its anti-particle and can be seen only at very high energies generated by the Tevatron in Fermilab or LHC in Geneva.

Sidharth said his theory of the new theoretically predicted force and associated particle was based on intense research and observation, and a report on it will soon appear in the Journal of Theoretical Physics.

A large team of scientists called the CDF (Collider Detector at Fermilab) team also recently found evidence for the new force, as also the associated particle, he claims.

(Jatindra Dash can be contacted at jatindra.d@ians.in)

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

|| By: Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri Maharaja, Ph.D. ||

Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri

Darwinism, or the original theory of evolution proposed by Darwin 150 years ago in his Origin of Species, in which he introduced the idea of natural selection, was laid to rest about a half century ago when it was succeeded by the neo-Darwinian theory involving genetic mutation and natural selection, also known as the modern synthesis. Since then an endless stream of textbooks, courses, media presentations and “genetic toolkits”[1] have been used to indoctrinate students and the public with these ideas causing many to give up their religious conviction in God or the soul as integral to their understanding of life.However, with the advancement of science, especially in the field of biology, more detailed knowledge of the genes and genome have revealed a far more complex dynamic relation between the genome and phoneme and its environment than can be explained by appeal to simple genetic mechanisms. This has been a dawning realization among biologists during the last few decades, but the “evolution industry” (Suzan Mazur, The Altenberg 16: An Exposé Of The Evolution Industry (2010)) has kept the public in the dark about the real scientific overthrow of the modern evolutionary synthesis. Now all of that is about to change.

MS Tombstone

Scientist were invited to attend a 2008 conference in Altenberg, Austria, to address this critical junction: “The challenge seems clear to us: how do we make sense, conceptually, of the astounding advances in biology since the 1940s, when the Modern Synthesis was taking shape? Not only we have witnessed the molecular revolution, from the discovery of the structure of DNA to the genomic era, we are also grappling with the increasing feeling – for example as reflected by an almost comical proliferation of “-omics,” that we just don’t have the theoretical and analytical tools necessary to make sense of the bewildering diversity and complexity of living organisms.”

A senior investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, and National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, has published two peer reviewed papers on the current status of the “modern evolutionary synthesis,” wherein he states, “The edifice of the modern synthesis has crumbled, apparently, beyond repair.” [Eugene Koonin, The Origin at 150: Is a new evolutionary synthesis in sight?" Trends in Genetics, 25(11), November 2009, pp. 473-475] and [Eugene Koonin,  Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics, Nucleic Acids Research, 37(4), 2009, pp. 1011-1034].

From the abstract of his second paper: “Comparative genomics and systems biology offer unprecedented opportunities for testing central tenets of evolutionary biology formulated by Darwin in the Origin of Species in 1859 and expanded in the Modern Synthesis 100 years later. Evolutionary-genomic studies show that natural selection is only one of the forces that shape genome evolution and is not quantitatively dominant, whereas non-adaptive processes are much more prominent than previously suspected. Major contributions of horizontal gene transfer and diverse selfish genetic elements to genome evolution undermine the Tree of Life concept.[2] An adequate depiction of evolution requires the more complex concept of a network or ‘forest’ of life. There is no consistent tendency of evolution towards increased genomic complexity, and when complexity increases, this appears to be a non adaptive consequence of evolution under weak purifying selection rather than an adaptation.”

The concept that natural selection provides the foundation for evolutionary change has long been challenged for its failure to explain how different forms arises in nature, but only how they may be favored once they do arise. Through the work of scientists like Motoo Kimura, Tomoko Ohta [Theoretical aspects of population genetics, Motoo Kimura and Tomoko Ohta (1971)] and others, it has been concluded both theoretically and empirically that natural selection has little or no effect on the vast majority of the genomes of most living organisms.

In this regard, Dr. Koonin adds (see above): “There is no consistent tendency of evolution towards increased genomic complexity, and when complexity increases, this appears to be a non adaptive consequence of evolution under weak purifying selection rather than an adaptation.” Purifying evolution refers to the cell’s coordinated elimination of harmful mutations.

Allen MacNeill [teaching biology at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY] writes on his blog[3]: “Kimura, Ohta, Jukes, and Crow dropped a monkey wrench into the “engine” at the heart of the modern synthesis ­ natural selection ­ and then Gould and Lewontin finished the job with their famous paper on The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.” [4]

Suzan Mazur, laying down the gauntlet recently wrote [5]: “Let’s begin with the facts: The days of evolutionary science being an exclusive old boys club are over. The public is a party to the discourse now and knows the emphasis in evolutionary science is on VISION and not textbook rules. And while Rutgers philosopher Jerry Fodor’s and University of Arizona cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s new book, “What Darwin Got Wrong.” does not showcase amateur evolutionary theories, the authors do indeed reach out to the public “hop[ing] to convince” through Fodor’s sublime ability to argue a point and Piattelli-Palmarini’s wit, charm and biophysics savvy that we as a people have got to move on because the central story of the theory of evolution ­ natural selection ­ is wrong in a way that “can’t be repaired”. They are careful not to say what the public also knows, i.e., that a critical mass of people is simply tired of Darwin’s vision. It’s out of vogue.”

And, as if to add yet another nail to the coffin: “Unless the discourse around evolution is opened up to scientific perspectives beyond Darwinism, the education of generations to come is at risk of being sacrificed for the benefit of a dying theory.” – Stuart Newman ( professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College in Valhalla, NY) [6]

It was Darwin, himself who explained how he should be buried: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” [7]

Suzan Mazur writes, “Stuart Newman’s now got a seductive theory about the origin of form of all 35 or so animal phyla–”it happened abruptly” not gradually, roughly 600 million years ago via a “pattern language”–which serves as the centerpiece of the “Extended Synthesis.”" [8]

While what is being called the “Extended Synthesis” does not outright dispense with natural selection and gene mutations, it subordinates them to minor roles. And while the concept of evolution itself is certainly not yet rejected by these scientists, the gradual march of science is demonstrating how scientific understanding is constantly subject to error and revision because of its inherently finite, incomplete view of reality.

In order to assuage the feelings of the Darwinian ideologues like Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education in the US, and others the term “expanded synthesis,” is being promoted with the assurance that neo-Darwinian mechanisms are still being brought into the picture, although in a subordinate way, in order to ease their transition into what is not only a change in thinking about life, but a change in how to think about life in a non-mechanistic, dynamic, and holistic way, e.g. Complexity Philosophy’ [9]

Vedantic science does not suffer the fate of finitistic science but has  proposed for millennia that the cause of the diversity of species is due to the underlying variety of conscious living entities that manifest such bodies as indicated by theistic Samkhya philosophy. Modern science has not yet progressed to the finer level of understanding that requires advancement beyond a purely materialistic ontology. It must be properly appreciated that Vedantic knowledge is also systematic, scientific and rational but requires a different epistemic-ontological grounding than the impersonal/materialist paradigm assumes.

And it is condescending to think that the ancient cultures were somehow more primitive, mythological, or somehow less informed about nature and reality than modern scientists. The chronological conceit of authors like Jean Gebser, Brian Swmimme and others think modern man to be superior to all previous civilizations that they know of based on a narrow materialist, Eurocentric education and the hegemony that the history of civilizations from that perspective has gained. Of course, there are civilizations mentioned in the Vedas that they simply have no knowledge of or they consider mythological. Nonetheless, their ideas are simply not true when considered from the conscious basis upon which reality is grounded according to Vedic understanding, from which a strong case may be made for their superior advancement. Much evidence of those civilizations has been lost through the course of history but what remains in the form of sacred literature has never been excelled.

Descartes laid the philosophical groundwork for the modern scientific period by separating subjective cognition from objective bodies, thereby also dividing epistemology from ontology reducing knowing to indifferent “observation.” This is the perspective of consciousness and its object, of which material science only imperfectly studies the object. In reality these two are not separated but dialectically related and sublated in the higher comprehending original unity of self-consciousness. Physical scientists fail to study these higher categories of reality and are therefore left with an incomplete understanding of a mere superficial nature that is inadequate to comprehend the core truth.

But scientific, rational inquiry will not stop until a comprehensive idea is reached that is coherent with the full range of our knowledge of life. That spectrum of knowledge is not circumscribed merely by chemistry, physics and mathematics. ThusVedanta-sutra advises, that you will have to continue your search, athatho brahma jijnasa, until you reach brahma, the underlying spiritual source, janmady asy yatah, the fountainhead where all inquiry will reach its purpose. Then beyond knowledgeBhagavatam will guide us to the ultimate search - raso vai sah,  the search for our highest fulfillment, sweetness and love.

References:

[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/4/l_034_04.html
[2] Will Provine, Tisch distinguished professor of Paleontology at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in an interview states, “We’ve discovered that Darwin’s idea of evolution by descent from comment ancestors does not really work well as soon as you get behind multi-cellular organisms….and our methods phylogeny reconstruction are so poor, that we will never have a tree of life that goes back to the origin of life.”
[3] http://evolutionlist.blogspot.com/
[4] Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin. “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme” Proc. Roy. Soc. London B 205 (1979) pp. 581-598
[5] http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1003/S00236.htm
[6] Stuart Newman, Evolution: The Public’s Problem, and the Scientists’ (2008).
[7] Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species Ch. 6. (1859)
[8] http://www.archaeology.org/online/interviews/newman.html
[9] http://www.calresco.org/lucas/compute.htm

After 15 days of investigation, India’s Defense Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences concluded its study of 82-year-old yogi Prahlad Jani on Thursday, May 6.

Jani, who claims to have lived without food or water since his childhood, was under the close watch of three video cameras 24 hours a day. Researchers conducted various medical tests on him. The research team, consisting of 35 scientists, could not find any evidence that Jani ate or drank anything during the 15 days.

Doctors have not found any adverse effects in his body from hunger or dehydration. They think that yoga exercises may have caused Jani’s body to undergo a biological transformation. The researchers said tests found that hisbrain is equivalent to that of a 25-year-old.

In fact, according to the Daily Mail, the doctors said that after fasting for two weeks, Jani was healthier than the average 40-year-old.
Related Articles
Researchers Find Miracles in Yogi’s Fasting
Indian Man Lives Seven Decades Without Food or Water
When a person fasts, there are usually changes in metabolism, but that was not observed in Jani.

“Clinical, biochemical, radiological, and other relevant examinations were done on Prahlad Jani and all reports were within the safe range throughout the study. He is healthy; his mind is sharp,” said researcher Dr. G. Ilavazhagn according to the Daily Mail. “What is truly astonishing, and something we have no explanation for, is that he has not passed stools or urine. To my knowledge, that is medically unprecedented.”

Scientists will continue to analyze the results from this study, and it may take two months for them to draw conclusions.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/periplus.html

1. Of the designated ports on the Erythraean Sea, and the market-towns around it, the first is the Egyptian port of Mussel Harbor. To those sailing down from that place, on the right hand, after eighteen hundred stadia, there is Berenice. The harbors of both are at the boundary of Egypt, and are bays opening from the Erythraean Sea.

2. On the right-hand coast next below Berenice is the country of the Berbers. Along the shore are the Fish-Eaters, living in scattered caves in the narrow valleys. Further inland are the Berbers, and beyond them the Wild-flesh-Eaters and Calf-Eaters, each tribe governed by its chief; and behind them, further inland, in the country towards the west, there lies a city called Meroe.

3. Below the Calf-Eaters there is a little market-town on the shore after sailing about four thousand stadia from Berenice, called Ptolemais of the Hunts, from which the hunters started for the interior under the dynasty of the Ptolemies. This market-town has the true land-tortoise in small quantity; it is white and smaller in the shells. And here also is found a little ivory like that of Adulis. But the place has no harbor and is reached only by small boats.

4. Below Ptolemais of the Hunts, at a distance of about three thousand stadia, there is Adulis, a port established by law, lying at the inner end of a bay that runs in toward the south. Before the harbor lies the so-called Mountain Island, about two hundred stadia seaward from the very head of the bay, with the shores of the mainland close to it on both sides. Ships bound for this port now anchor here because of attacks from the land. They used formerly to anchor at the very head of the bay, by an island called Diodorus, close to the shore, which could be reached on foot from the land; by which means the barbarous natives attacked the island. Opposite Mountain Island, on the mainland twenty stadia from shore, lies Adulis, a fair-sized village, from which there is a three-days' journey to Coloe, an inland town and the first market for ivory. From that place to the city of the people called Auxumites there is a five days' journey more; to that place all the ivory is brought from the country beyond the Nile through the district called Cyeneum, and thence to Adulis. Practically the whole number of elephants and rhinoceros that are killed live in the places inland, although at rare intervals they are hunted on the seacoast even near Adulis. Before the harbor of that market-town, out at sea on the right hand, there lie a great many little sandy islands called Alalaei, yielding tortoise-shell, which is brought to market there by the Fish-Eaters.

5. And about eight hundred stadia beyond there is another very deep bay, with a great mound of sand piled up at the right of the entrance; at the bottom of which the opsian stone is found, and this is the only place where it is produced. These places, from the Calf-Eaters to the other Berber country, are governed by Zoscales; who is miserly in his ways and always striving for more, but otherwise upright, and acquainted with Greek literature.

6. There are imported into these places, undressed cloth made in Egypt for the Berbers; robes from Arsinoe; cloaks of poor quality dyed in colors; double-fringed linen mantles; many articles of flint glass, and others of murrhine, made in Diospolis; and brass, which is used for ornament and in cut pieces instead of coin; sheets of soft copper, used for cooking-utensils and cut up for bracelets and anklets for the women; iron, which is made into spears used against the elephants and other wild beasts, and in their wars. Besides these, small axes are imported, and adzes and swords; copper drinking-cups, round and large; a little coin for those coming to the market; wine of Laodicea and Italy, not much; olive oil, not much; for the king, gold and silver plate made after the fashion of the country, and for clothing, military cloaks, and thin coats of skin, of no great value. Likewise from the district of Ariaca across this sea, there are imported Indian iron, and steel, and Indian cotton cloth; the broad cloth called monache and that called sagmatogene, and girdles, and coats of skin and mallow-colored cloth, and a few muslins, and colored lac. There are exported from these places ivory, and tortoiseshell and rhinoceros-horn. The most from Egypt is brought to this market from the month of January to September, that is, from Tybi to Thoth; but seasonably they put to sea about the month of September.

7. From this place the Arabian Gulf trends toward the east and becomes narrowest just before the Gulf of Avalites. After about four thousand stadia, for those sailing eastward along the same coast, there are other Berber market-towns, known as the 'far-side' ports; lying at intervals one after the other, without harbors but having roadsteads where ships can anchor and lie in good weather. The first is called Avalites; to this place the voyage from Arabia to the far-side coast is the shortest. Here there is a small market-town called Avalites, which must be reached by boats and rafts. There are imported into this place, flint glass, assorted; juice of sour grapes from Diospolis; dressed cloth, assorted, made for the Berbers; wheat, wine, and a little tin. There are exported from the same place, and sometimes by the Berbers themselves crossing on rafts to Ocelis and Muza on the opposite shore, spices, a little ivory, tortoise-shell, and a very little myrrh, but better than the rest. And the Berbers who live in the place are very unruly.

8. After Avalites there is another market-town, better than this, called Malao, distant a sail of about eight hundred stadia. The anchorage is an open roadstead, sheltered by a spit running out from the east. Here the natives are more peaceable. There are imported into this place the things already mentioned, and many tunics, cloaks from Arsinoe, dressed and dyed; drinking-cups, sheets of soft copper in small quantity, iron, and gold and silver coin, not much. There are exported from these places myrrh, a little frankincense, (that known as far-side), the harder cinnamon, duaca, Indian copal and macir, which are imported into Arabia; and slaves, but rarely.

9. Two days' sail, or three, beyond Malao is the market-town of Mundus, where the ships lie at anchor more safely behind a projecting island close to the shore. There are imported into this place the things previously set forth, and from it likewise are exported the merchandise already stated, and the incense called mocrotu. And the traders living here are more quarrelsome.

10. Beyond Mundus, sailing toward the east, after another two days' sail, or three, you reach Mosyllum, on a beach, with a bad anchorage. There are imported here the same things already mentioned, also silver plate, a very little iron, and glass. There are shipped from the place a great quantity of cinnamon, (so that this market-town requires ships of larger size), and fragrant gums, spices, a little tortoise shell, and mocrotu, (poorer, than that of Mundus), frankincense, (the far-side), ivory and myrrh in small quantities.

11. Sailing along the coast beyond Mosyllum, after a two days' course you come to the so-called Little Nile River, and a fine spring, and a small laurel-grove, and Cape Elephant. Then the shore recedes into a bay, and has a river, called Elephant, and a large laurel-grove called Acannae; where alone is produced the far-side frankincense, in great quantity and of the best grade.

12. Beyond this place, the coast trending toward the south, there is the Market and Cape of Spices, an abrupt promontory, at the very end of the Berber coast toward the east. The anchorage is dangerous at times from the ground-swell, because the place is exposed to the north. A sign of an approaching storm which is peculiar to the place, is that the deep water becomes more turbid and changes its color. When this happens they all run to a large promontory called Tabae, which offers safe shelter. There are imported into this market town the things already mentioned; and there are produced in it cinnamon (and its different varieties, gizir, asypha, areho, iriagia, and moto) and frankincense.

13. Beyond Tabae, after four hundred stadia, there is the village of Pano. And then, after sailing four hundred stadia along a promontory, toward which place the current also draws you, there is another market-town called Opone, into which the same things are imported as those already mentioned, and in it the greatest quantity of cinnamon is produced, (the arebo and moto), ind slaves of the better sort, which are brought to Egypt in increasing numbers; and a great quantity of tortoiseshell, better than that found elsewhere.

14. The voyage to all these farside market-towns is made from Egypt about the month of July, that is Epiphi. And ships are also customarily fitted out from the places across this sea, from Ariaca and Barygaza, bringing to these far-side market-towns the products of their own places; wheat, rice, clarified butter, sesame oil, cotton cloth, (the monache and the sagmatogene), and girdles, and honey from the reed called sacchari. Some make the voyage especially to these market-towns, and others exchange their cargoes while sailing along the coast. This country is not subject to a King, but each market-town is ruled by its separate chief.

15. Beyond Opone, the shore trending more toward the south, first there are the small and great bluffs of Azania; this coast is destitute of harbors, but there are places where ships can lie at anchor, the shore being abrupt; and this course is of six days, the direction being south-west. Then come the small and great beach for another six days' course and after that in order, the Courses of Azania, the first being called Sarapion and the next Nicon; and after that several rivers and other anchorages, one after the other, separately a rest and a run for each day, seven in all, until the Pyralax islands and what is called the channel; beyond which, a little to the south of south-west, after two courses of a day and night along the Ausanitic coast, is the island Menuthias, about three hundred stadia from the mainland, low and and wooded, in which there are rivers and many kinds of birds and the mountain-tortoise. There are no wild beasts except the crocodiles; but there they do not attack men. In this place there are sewed boats, and canoes hollowed from single logs, which they use for fishing and catching tortoise. In this island they also catch them in a peculiar wav, in wicker baskets, which they fasten across the channel-opening between the breakers.

16. Two days' sail beyond, there lies the very last market-town of the continent of Azania, which is called Rhapta; which has its name from the sewed boats (rhapton ploiarion) already mentioned; in which there is ivory in great quantity, and tortoise-shell. Along this coast live men of piratical habits, very great in stature, and under separate chiefs for each place. The Mapharitic chief governs it under some ancient right that subjects it to the sovereignty of the state that is become first in Arabia. And the people of Muza now hold it under his authority, and send thither many large ships; using Arab captains and agents, who are familiar with the natives and intermarry with them, and who know the whole coast and understand the language.

17. There are imported into these markets the lances made at Muza especially for this trade, and hatchets and daggers and awls, and various kinds of glass; and at some places a little wine, and wheat, not for trade, but to serve for getting the good-will of the savages. There are exported from these places a great quantity of ivory, but inferior to that of Adulis, and rhinoceros-horn and tortoise-shell (which is in best demand after that from India), and a little palm-oil.

18. And these markets of Azania are the very last of the continent that stretches down on the right hand from Berenice; for beyong these places the unexplored ocean curves around toward the west, and running along by the regions to the south of Aethiopia and Libya and Africa, it mingles with the western sea.

19. Now to the left of Berenice, sailing for two or three days from Mussel Harbor eastward across the adjacent gulf, there is another harbor and fortified place, which is called White Village, from which there is a road to Petra, which is subject to Malichas, King of the Nabataeans. It holds the position of a market-town for the small vessels sent there from Arabia; and so a centurion is stationed there as a collector of one-fourth of the merchandise imported, with an armed force, as a garrison.

20. Directly below this place is the adjoining country of Arabia, in its length bordering a great distance on the Erythraean Sea. Different tribes inhabit the country, differing in their speech, some partially, and some altogether. The land next the sea is similarly dotted here and there with caves of the Fish-Eaters, but the country inland is peopled by rascally men speaking two languages, who live in villages and nomadic camps, by whom those sailing off the middle course are plundered, and those surviving shipwrecks are taken for slaves. And so they too are continually taken prisoners by the chiefs and kings of Arabia; and they are called Carnaites. Navigation is dangerous along this whole coast of Arabia, which is without harbors, with bad anchorages, foul, inaccessible because of breakers and rocks, and terrible in every way. Therefore we hold our course down the middle of the gulf and pass on as fast as possible by the country of Arabia until we come to the Burnt Island; directly below which there are regions of peaceful people, nomadic, pasturers of cattle, sheep and camels.

21. Beyond these places, in a bay at the foot of the left side of this gulf, there is a place by the shore called Muza, a market-town established by law, distant altogether from Berenice for those sailing southward, about twelve thousand stadia. And the whole place is crowded with Arab shipowners and seafaring men, and is busy with the affairs of commerce; for they carry on a trade with the far-side coast and with Barygaza, sending their own ships there.

22. Three days inland from this port there is a city called Saua, in the midst of the region called Mapharitis; and there is a vassal-chief named Cholaebus who lives in that city.

23. And after nine days more there is Saphar, the metropolis, in which lives Charibael, lawful king of two tribes, the Homerites and those living next to them, called the Sabaites; through continual embassies and gifts, he is a friend of the Emperors.

24. The market-town of Muza is without a harbor, but has a good roadstead and anchorage because of the sandy bottom thereabouts, where the anchors hold safely. The merchandise imported there consists of purple cloths, both fine and coarse; clothing in the Arabian style, with sleeves; plain, ordinary, embroidered, or interwoven with gold; saffron, sweet rush, muslins, cloaks, blankets (not many), some plain and others made in the local fashion; sashes of different colors, fragrant ointments in moderate quantity, wine and wheat, not much. For the country produces grain in moderate amount, and a great deal of wine. And to the King and the Chief are given horses and sumpter-mules, vessels of gold and polished silver, finely woven clothing and copper vessels. There are exported from the same place the things produced in the country: selected myrrh, and the Gebanite-Minaean stacte, alabaster and all the things already mentioned from Avalites and the far-side coast. The voyage to this place is made best about the month of September, that is Thoth; but there is nothing to prevent it even earlier.

25. After sailing beyond this place about three hundred stadia, the coast of Arabia and the Berber country about the Avalitic gulf now coming close together, there is a channel, not long in extent, which forces the sea together and shuts it into a narrow strait, the passage through which, sixty stadia in length, the island Diodorus divides. Therefore the course through it is beset with rushing currents and with strong winds blowing down from the adjacent ridge of mountains. Directly on this strait by the shore there is a village of Arabs, subject to the same chief, called Ocelis; which is not so much a market-town as it is an anchorage and watering-place and the first landing for those sailing into the gulf.

26. Beyond Ocelis, the sea widening again toward the east and soon giving a view of the open ocean, after about twelve hundred stadia there is Eudaemon Arabia, a village by the shore, also of the Kingdom of Charibael, and having convenient anchorages, and watering places, sweeter and better than those at Ocelis; it lies at the entrance of a bay, and the land recedes from it. It was called Eudaemon, because in the early days of the city when the voyage was not yet made from India to Egypt, and when they did not dare to sail from Egypt to the ports across this ocean, but all came together at this place, it received the cargoes from both countries, just as Alexandria now receives the things brought both from abroad and from Egypt. But not long before our own time Charibael destroyed the place.

27. After Eudaemon Arabia there is a continuous length of coast, and a bay extending two thousand stadia or more, along which there are Nomads and Fish-Eaters living in villages; just beyond the cape projecting from this bay there is another market-town by the shore, Cana, of the Kingdom of Eleazus, the Frankincense Country; and facing it there are two desert islands, one called Island of Birds, the other Dome Island, one hundred and twenty stadia from Cana. Inland from this place lies the metropolis Sabbatha, in which the King lives. All the frankincense produced in the country is brought by camels to that place to be stored, and to Cana on rafts held up by inflated skins after the manner of the country, and in boats. And this place has a trade also with the far-side ports, with Barygaza. and Scythia and Ommana and the neighboring coast of Persia.

28. There are imported into this place from Egypt a little wheat and wine, as at Muza; clothing in the Arabian style, plain and common and most of it spurious; and copper and tin and coral and storax and other things such as go to Muza; and for the King usually wrought gold and silver plate, also horses, images, and thin clothing of fine quality. And there are exported from this place, native produce, frankincense and aloes, and the rest of the things that enter into the trade of the other ports. The voyage to this place is best made at the same time as that to Muza, or rather earlier.

29. Beyond Cana, the land receding greatly, there follows a very deep bay stretching a great way across, which is called Sachalites; and the Frankincense Country, mountainous and forbidding, wrapped in thick clouds and fog, and yielding frankincense from the trees. These incense-bearing trees are not of great height or thickness; they bear the frankincense sticking in drops on the bark, just as the trees among us in Egypt weep their gum. The frankincense is gathered by the King's slaves and those who are sent to this service for punishment. For these places are very unhealthy, and pestilential even to those sailing along the coast; but almost always fatal to those working there, who also perish often from want of food.

30. On this bay there is a very great promontory facing the east, called Syagrus; on which is a fort for the defence of the country, and a harbor and storehouse for the frankincense that is collected; and opposite this cape, well out at sea, there is an island, lying between it and the Cape of Spices opposite, but nearer Syagrus: it is called Dioscorida, and is very large but desert and marshy, having rivers in it and crocodiles and many snakes and great lizards, of which the flesh is eaten and the fat melted and used instead of olive oil. The island yields no fruit, neither vine nor grain. The inhabitants are few and they live on the coast toward the north, which from this side faces the continent. They are foreigners, a mixture of Arabs and Indians and Greeks, who have emigrated to carry on trade there. The island produces the true sea-tortoise, and the land-tortoise, and the white tortoise which is very numerous and preferred for its large shells; and the mountain-tortoise, which is largest of all and has the thickest shell; of which the worthless specimens cannot be cut apart on the under side, because they are even too hard; but those of value are cut apart and the shells made whole into caskets and small plates and cake-dishes and that sort of ware. There is also produced in this island cinnabar, that called Indian, which is collected in drops from the trees.

31. It happens that just as Azania is subject to Charibael and the Chief of Mapharitis, this island is subject to the King of the Frankincense Country. Trade is also carried on there by some people from Muza and by those who chance to call there on the voyage from Damirica and Barygaza; they bring in rice and wheat and Indian cloth, and a few female slaves; and they take for their exchange cargoes, a great quantity of tortoise-shell. Now the island is farmed out under the Kings and is garrisoned.

32. Immediately beyond Syagrus the bay of Omana cuts deep into the coast-line, the width of it being six hundred stadia; and beyond this there are mountains, high and rocky and steep, inhabited by cave-dwellers for five hundred stadia more; and beyond this is a port established for receiving the Sachalitic frankincense; the harbor is called Moscha, and ships from Cana call there regularly; and ships returning from Damirica and Barygaza, if the season is late, winter there, and trade with the King's officers, exchanging their cloth and wheat and sesame oil for frankincense, which lies in heaps all over the Sachalitic country, open and unguarded, as if the place were under the protection of the gods; for neither openly nor by stealth can it be loaded on board ship without the King's permission; if a single grain were loaded without this, the ship could not clear from the harbor.

33. Beyond the harbor of Moscha for about fifteen hundred stadia as far as Asich, a mountain range runs along the shore; at the end of which, in a row, lie seven islands, called Zenobian. Beyond these there is a barbarous region which is no longer of the same Kingdom, but now belongs to Persia. Sailing along this coast well out at sea for two thousand stadia from the Zenobian Islands, there meets you an island called Sarapis, about one hundred and twenty stadia from the mainland. It is about two hundred stadia wide and six hundred long, inhabited by three settlements of Fish-Eaters, a villainous lot, who use the Arabian language and wear girdles of palm-leaves. The island produces considerable tortoise-shell of fine quality, and small sailboats and cargo-ships are sent there regularly from Cana.

34. Sailing along the coast, which trends northward toward the entrance of the Persian Sea, there are many islands known as the Calxi, after about two thousand stadia, extending along the shore. The inhabitants are a treacherous lot, very little civilized.

35. At the upper end of these Calaei islands is a range of mountains called Calon, and there follows not far beyond, the mouth of the Persian Gulf, where there is much diving for the pearl-mussel. To the left of the straits are great mountains called Asabon, and to the right there rises in full view another round and high mountain called Semiramis; between them the passage across the strait is about six hundred stadia; beyond which that very great and broad sea, the Persian Gulf, reaches far into the interior. At the upper end of this Gulf there is a market-town designated by law called Apologus, situated near Charax Spasini and the River Euphrates.

36. Sailing through the mouth of the Gulf, after a six-days' course there is another market-town of Persia called Ommana. To both of these market-towns large vessels are regularly sent from Barygaza, loaded with copper and sandalwood and timbers of teakwood and logs of blackwood and ebony. To Ommana frankincense is also brought from Cana, and from Ommana to Arabia boats sewed together after the fashion of the place; these are known as madarata. From each of these market-towns, there are exported to Barygaza and also to Arabia, many pearls, but inferior to those of lndia; purple, clothing after the fashion of the place, wine, a great quantity of dates, gold and slaves.

37. Beyond the Ommanitic region there is a country also of the Parsids, of another Kingdom, and the bay of Gedrosia, from the middle of which a cape juts out into the bay. Here there is a river affording an entrance for ships, with a little market-town at the mouth, called Oraea; and back from the place an inland city, distant a seven days' journey from the sea, in which also is the King's court; it is called ----- (probably Rhambacia). This country yields much, wheat, wine, rice and dates; but along the coast there is nothing but bdellium.

38. Beyond this region, the continent making a wide curve from the east across the depths of the bays, there follows the coast district of Scythia, which lies above toward the north; the whole marshy; from which flows down the river Sinthus, the greatest of all the rivers that flow into the Erythraean Sea, bringing down an enormous volume of water; so that a long. way out at sea, before reaching this country, the water of the ocean is fresh from it. Now as a sign of approach to this country to those coming from the sea, there are serpents coming forth from the depths to meet you; and a sign of the places just mentioned and in Persia, are those called graoe. This river has seven mouths, very shallow and marshy, so that they are not navigable, except the one in the middle; at which by the shore, is the market-town, Barbaricum. Before it there lies a small island, and inland behind it is the metropolis of Scythia, Minnagara; it is subject to Parthian princes who are constantly driving each other out.

39. The ships lie at anchor at Barbaricum, but all their cargoes are carried up to the metropolis by the river, to the King. There are imported into this market a great deal of thin clothing, and a little spurious; figured linens, topaz, coral, storax, frankincense, vessels of glass, silver and gold plate, and a little wine. On the other hand there are exported costus, bdellium, lycium, nard, turquoise, lapis lazuli, Seric skins, cotton cloth, silk yarn, and indigo. And sailors set out thither with the Indian Etesian winds, about the, month of July, that is Epiphi: it is more dangerous then, but through these winds the voyage is more direct, and sooner completed.

40. Beyond the river Sinthus there is another gulf, not navigable, running in toward the north; it is called Eirinon; its parts are called separately the small gulf and the great; in both parts the water is shallow, with shifting sandbanks occurring continually and a great way from shore; so that very often when the shore is not even in sight, ships run aground, and if they attempt to hold their course they are wrecked. A promontory stands out from this gulf, curving around from Eirinon toward the East, then South, then West, and enclosing the gulf called Baraca, which contains seven islands. Those who come to the entrance of this bay escape it by putting about a little and standing further out to sea; but those who are drawn inside into the gulf of Baraca are lost; for the waves are high and very violent, and the sea is tumultuous and foul, and has eddies and rushing whirlpools. The bottom is in some places abrupt, and in others rocky and sharp, so that the anchors lying there are parted, some being quickly cut off, and others chafing on the bottom. As a sign of these places to those approaching from the sea there are serpents, very large and black; for at the other places on this coast and around Barygazal, they are smaller, and in color bright green, running into gold.

41. Beyond the gulf of Baraca is that of Barygaza and the coast of the country of Ariaca, which is the beginning of the Kingdom of Nambanus and of all India. That part of it lying inland and adjoining Scythia is called Abiria, but the coast is called Syrastrene. It is a fertile country, yielding wheat and rice and sesame oil and clarified butter, cotton and the Indian cloths made therefrom, of the coarser sorts. Very many cattle are pastured there, and the men are of great stature and black in color. The metropolis of this country is Minnagara, from which much cotton cloth is brought down to Barygaza. In these places there remain even to the present time signs of the expedition of Alexander, such as ancient shrines, walls of forts and great wells. The sailing course along this coast, from Barbaricum to the promontory called Papica opposite Barygaza, and before Astacampra, is of three thousand stadia.

42. Beyond this there is another gulf exposed to the sea-waves, running up toward the north, at the mouth of which there is an island called Baeones; at its innermost part there is a great river called Mais. Those sailing to Barygaza pass across this gulf, which is three hundred stadia in width, leaving behind to their left the island just visible from their tops toward the east, straight to the very mouth of the river of Barygaza; and this river is called Nammadus.

43. This gulf is very narrow to Barygaza and very hard to navigate for those coming from the ocean; this is the case with both the right and left passages, but there is a better passage through the left. For on the right at the very mouth of the gulf there lies a shoal, long and narrow, and full of rocks, called Herone, facing the village of Cammoni; and opposite this on the left projects the promontory that lies before Astacampra, which is called Papica, and is a bad anchorage because of the strong current setting in around it and because the anchors are cut off, the bottom being rough and rocky. And even if the entrance to the gulf is made safely, the mouth of the river at Barygaza is found with difficulty, because the shore is very low and cannot be made out until you are close upon it. And when, you have found it the passage is difficult because of the shoals at the mouth of the river.

44. Because of this, native fishermen in the King's service, stationed at the very entrance in well-manned large boats called tappaga and cotymba, go up the coast as far as Syrastrene, from which they pilot vessels to Barygaza. And they steer them straight from the mouth of the bay between the shoals with their crews; and they tow them to fixed stations, going up with the beginning of the flood, and lying through the ebb at anchorages and in basins. These basins are deeper places in the river as far as Barygaza; which lies by the river, about three hundred stadia up from the mouth.

45. Now the whole country of India has very many rivers, and very great ebb and flow of the tides; increasing at the new moon, and at the full moon for three days, and falling off during the intervening days of the moon. But about Barygaza it is much greater, so that the bottom is suddenly seen, and now parts of the dry land are sea, and now it is dry where ships were sailing just before; and the rivers, under the inrush of the flood tide, when the whole force of the sea is directed against them, are driven upwards more strongly against their natural current, for many stadia.

46. For this reason entrance and departure of vessels is very dangerous to those who are inexperienced or who come to this market-town for the first time. For the rush of waters at the incoming tide is irresistible, and the anchors cannot hold against it; so that large ships are caught up by the force of it, turned broadside on through the speed of the current, and so driven on the shoals and wrecked; and smaller boats are overturned; and those that have been turned aside among the channels by the receding waters at the ebb, are left on their sides, and if not held on an even keel by props, the flood tide comes upon them suddenly and under the first head of the current they are filled with water. For there is so great force in the rush of the sea at the new moon, especially during the flood tide at night, that if you begin the entrance at the moment when the waters are still, on the instant there is borne to you at the mouth of the river, a noise like the cries of an army heard from afar; and very soon the sea itself comes rushing in over the shoals with a hoarse roar.

47. The country inland from Barygaza is inhabited by numerous tribes, such as the Arattii, the Arachosii, the Gandaraei and the people of Poclais, in which is Bucephalus Alexandria. Above these is the very warlike nation of the Bactrians, who are under their own king. And Alexander, setting out from these parts, penetrated to the Ganges, leaving aside Damirica and the southern part of India; and to the present day ancient drachmae are current in Barygaza, coming from this country, bearing inscriptions in Greek letters, and the devices of those who reigned after Alexander, Apollodorus and Menander.

48. Inland from this place and to the east, is the city called Ozene, formerly a royal capital; from this place are brought down all things needed for the welfare of the country about Barygaza, and many things for our trade: agate and carnelian, Indian muslins and mallow cloth, and much ordinary cloth. Through this same region and from the upper country is brought the spikenard that comes through Poclais; that is, the Caspapyrene and Paropanisene and Cabolitic and that brought through the adjoining country of Scythia; also costus and bdellium.

49. There are imported into this market-town, wine, Italian preferred, also Laodicean and Arabian; copper, tin, and lead; coral and topaz; thin clothing and inferior sorts of all kinds; bright-colored girdles a cubit wide; storax, sweet clover, flint glass, realgar, antimony, gold and silver coin, on which there is a profit when exchanged for the money of the country; and ointment, but not very costly and not much. And for the King there are brought into those places very costly vessels of silver, singing boys, beautiful maidens for the harem, fine wines, thin clothing of the finest weaves, and the choicest ointments. There are exported from these places spikenard, costus, bdellium, ivory, agate and carnelian, lycium, cotton cloth of all kinds, silk cloth, mallow cloth, yarn, long pepper and such other things as are brought here from the various market-towns. Those bound for this market-town from Egypt make the voyage favorably about the month of July, that is Epiphi.

50. Beyond Barygaza the adjoining coast extends in a straight line from north to south; and so this region is called Dachinabades, for dachanos in the language of the natives means 'south.' The inland country back from the coast toward the east comprises many desert regions and great mountains; and all kinds of wild beasts -- leopards, tigers, elephants, enormous serpents, hyenas, and baboons of many sorts; and many populous nations, as far as the Ganges.

51. Among the market-towns of Dachinabades there are two of special importance; Paethana, distant about twenty days' journey south from Barygaza; beyond which, about ten days' journey east, there is another very great city, Tagara. There are brought down to Barygaza from these places by wagons and through great tracts without roads, from Paethana carnelian in great quantity, and from Tagara much common cloth, all kinds of muslins and mallow cloth, and other merchandise brought there locally from the regions along the sea-coast. And the whole course to the end of Damirica is seven thousand stadia; but the distance is greater to the Coast Country.

52. The market-towns of this region are, in order, after Barygaza: Suppara, and the city of Calliena, which in the time of the elder Saraganus became a lawful market-town; but since it came into the possession of Sandares the port is much obstructed, and Greek ships landing there may chance to be taken to Barygaza under guard.

53. Beyond Calliena there are other market-towns of this region; Semylla, Mandagora, Palaepatmoe, Melizigara, Byzantium, Togarum and Aurannoboas. Then there are the islands called Sesecrienae and that of the Aegidii, and that of the Caenitae, opposite the place called Chersonesus (and in these places there are pirates), and after this the White Island. Then come Naura and Tyndis, the first markets of Damirica, and then Muziris and Nelcynda, which are now of leading importance.

54. Tyndis is of the Kingdom of Cerobothra; it is a village in plain sight by the sea. Muziris, of the same kingdom, abounds in ships sent there with cargoes from Arabia, and by the Greeks; it is located on a river, distant from Tyndis by river and sea five hundred stadia, and up the river from the shore twenty stadia. Nelcynda is distant from Muziris by river and sea about five hundred stadia, and is of another Kingdom, the Pandian. This place also is situated on a river, about one hundred and twenty stadia from the sea.

55. There is another place at the mouth of this river, the village of Bacare, to which ships drop down on the outward voyage from Nelcynda, and anchor in the roadstead to take on their cargoes; because the river is full of shoals and the channels are not clear. The kings of both these market-towns live in the interior. And as a sign to those approaching these places from the sea there are serpents coming forth to meet you, black in color, but shorter, like snakes in the head, and with blood-red eyes.

56. They send large ships to these market-towns on account of the great quantity and bulk of pepper and malabathrum. There are imported here, in the first place, a great quantity of coin; topaz, thin clothing, not much; figured linens, antimony, coral, crude glass, copper, tin, lead; wine, not much, but as much as at Barygaza; realgar and orpiment; and wheat enough for the sailors, for this is not dealt in by the merchants there. There is exported pepper, which is produced in quantity in only one region near these markets, a district called Cottonara. Besides this there are exported great quantities of fine pearls, ivory, silk cloth, spikenard from the Ganges, malabathrum from the places in the interior, transparent stones of' all kinds, diamonds and sapphires, and tortoise-shell; that from Chryse Island, and that taken among the islands along the coast of Damirica. They make the voyage to this place in a favorable season who set out from Egypt about the month of July, that is Epiphi.

57. This whole voyage as above described, from Cana and Eudaemon Arabia, they used to make in small vessels, sailing close around the shores of the gulfs; and Hippalus was the pilot who by observing the location of the ports and the conditions of the sea, first discovered how to lay his course straight across the ocean. For at the same time when with us the Etesian winds are blowing, on the shores of India the wind sets in from the ocean, and this southwest wind is called Hippalus, from the name of him who first discovered the passage across. From that time to the present day ships start, some direct from Cana, and some from the Cape of Spices; and those bound for Damirica throw the shlp's head considerably off the wind; while those bound for Barygaza and Scythia keep along shore not more than three days and for the rest of the time hold the same course straight out to sea from that region, with a favorable wind, quite away from the land, and so sail outside past the aforesaid gulfs.

58. Beyond Bacare there is the Dark Red Mountain, and another district stretching along the coast toward the south, called Paralia. The first place is called Balita; it has a fine harbor and a village by the shore. Beyond this there is another place called Comari, at which are the Cape of Comari and a harbor; hither come those men who wish to consecrate themselves for the rest of their lives, and bathe and dwell in celibacy; and women also do the same; for it is told that a goddess once dwelt here and bathed.

59. From Comari toward the south this region extends to Colchi, where the pearl-fisheries are; (they are worked by condemned criminals); and it belongs to the Pandian Kingdom. Beyond Colchi there follows another district called the Coast Country, which lies on a bay, and has a region inland called Argaru. At this place, and nowhere else, are bought the pearls gathered on the coast thereabouts; and from there are exported muslins, those called Argaritic.

60. Among the market-towns of these countries, and the harbors where the ships put in from Damirica and from the north, the most important are, in order as they lie, first Camara, then Poduca, then Sopatma; in which there are ships of the country coasting along the shore as far as Damirica; and other very large vessels made of single logs bound together, called sangara; but those which make the voyage to Chryse and to the Ganges are called colandia, and are very large. There are imported into these places everything made in Damirica, and the greatest part of what is brought at any time from Egypt comes here, together with most kinds of all the things that are brought from Damirica and of those that are carried through Paralia.

61. About the following region, the course trending toward the east, lying out at sea toward the west is the island Palaesimundu, called by the ancients Taprobane. The northern part is a day's journey distant, and the southern part trends gradually toward the west, and almost touches the opposite shore of Azania. It produces pearls, transparent stones, muslins, and tortoise-shell.

62. About these places is the region of Masalia stretching a great way along the coast before the inland country; a great quantity of muslins is made there. Beyond this region, sailing toward the cast and crossing the adjacent bay, there is the region of Dosarene, yielding the ivory known as Dosarenic. Beyond this, the course trending toward the north, there are many barbarous tribes, among whom are the Cirrhadae, a race of men with flattened noses, very savage; another tribe, the Bargysi; and the Horse-faces and the Long-faces, who are said to be cannibals.

63. After these, the course turns toward the east again, and sailing with the ocean to the right and the shore remaining beyond to the left, Ganges comes into view, and near it the very last land toward the east, Chryse. There is a river near it called the Ganges, and it rises and falls in the same way as the Nile. On its bank is a market-town which has the same name as the river, Ganges. Through this place are brought malabathrum and Gangetic spikenard and pearls, and rnuslins of the finest sorts, which are called Gangetic. It is said that there are gold-mines near these places, and there is a gold coin which is called caltis. And just opposite this river there is an island in the ocean, the last part of the inhabited world toward the cast, under the rising sun itself; it is called Chryse; and it has the best tortoise-shell of all the places on the Erythraean Sea.

64. After this region under the very north, the sea outside ending in a land called This, there is a very great inland city called Thinae, from which raw silk and silk yarn and silk cloth are brought on foot through Bactria to Barygaza, and are also exported to Damirica by way of the river Ganges. But the land of This is not easy of access; few men come from there, and seldom. The country lies under the Lesser Bear, and is said to border on the farthest parts of Pontus and the Caspian Sea, next to which lies Lake Maeotis; all of which empty into the ocean.

65. Every year on the borders of the land of This there comes together a tribe of men with short bodies and broad, flat faces, and by nature peaceable; they are called Besatae, and are almost entirely uncivilized. They come with their wives and children, carrying great packs and plaited baskets of what looks like green grape-leaves. They meet in a place between their own country and the land of This. There they hold a feast for several days, spreading out the baskets under themselves as mats, and then return to their own places in the interior. And then the natives watching them come into that place and gather up their mats; and they pick out from the braids the fibers which they call petri. They lay the leaves closely together in several layers and make them into balls, which they pierce with the fibers from the mats. And there are three sorts; those made of the largest leaves are called the large-ball malabathrum; those of the smaller, the medium-ball; and those of the smallest, the small-ball. Thus there exist three sorts of malabathrum, and it is brought into India by those who prepare it.

66. The regions beyond these places are either difficult of access because of their excessive winters and great cold, or else cannot be sought out because, of some divine influence of the gods.

Source:

W.H. Schoff (tr. & ed.), The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century(London, Bombay & Calcutta 1912).

http://www.und.ac.za/und/classics/india/periplus.htm

More on Science HERE

NEW DELHI, INDIA, February 28, 2011: India -- When Sumeet Kohli's husband was killed in a traffic accident, the 37-year-old was devastated. But when psychiatric medicines failed to help her, her husband's memory inspired her to make a decision she says changed her fate: She sought out a regression therapist who helped her dredge up memories of a past life.

With a deep belief in reincarnation founded in Hinduism, middle-class Indians are embracing past life regression as a form of psychotherapy -- once more showing how ancient traditions are fueling 'new age' spiritualism even among successful, educated pragmatists. But even though the concept of past lives is a vital feature of India's Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist religions, ironically, the therapy has boomeranged back to the subcontinent from the United States -- where the new embrace of Eastern religions, yoga and 'spirituality' has made regression more popular than ever.

The website of a prominent new age magazine lists some 150 practitioners of the therapy across India. Practitioners in urban centers such as Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore say they have seen patient numbers double over the past five years. And last year a major TV channel pioneered a reality show in which Mumbai-based psychologist Dr. Trupti Jayin supposedly helped ordinary people and celebrities access their past lives.

Kohli says past life regression worked for her. She was popping antidepressants and sleeping pills like candy -- to no avail -- when she recalled that at the time of his death her husband had been reading 'Many Lives, Many Masters,' the bestselling book by American past life regression pioneer Brian Weiss. After a diligent search, Kohli discovered Roma Singh, a hypnotist and alternative healer, who, like Weiss, claimed she could help people overcome problems by aiding them in recalling their past lives.

Hinduism today

See more on Near Death Experiences here http://www.hknet.org.nz/NDE.htm

More HERE - Reincarnation pages

Haribol,

In a recent issue of Newsweek magazine, there was an article on famous people who made their mark late in life. Srila Prabhupada, is the fifth personality listed, with a very nice description of the significant work he did after age 69 founding one of the most popular new religious movements. Gandhi is listed 6th!

The link is:
http://www.newsweek.com/photo/2010/11/15/successes-that-were-late-bloomers.html

Yours in service,  Atmananda dasa  (thanks to Vasudeva prabhu)

LONDON, U.K., February, 2011: Practitioners of Ayurvedic and other traditional medicines in Europe are bracing themselves for a tough licensing system similar to that for Western medicines. The EU's Traditional Herbal Medical Products Directive is set to come into effect on May 1, and requires any herbal medicine sold over the counter to have either a Traditional Herbal Registration or a marketing authorization. The legislation is tantamount to a ban on ayurvedic herbs, as just over 70 herbal products in the UK (none of which is Ayurvedic) have so far got the licence.

Mr Sebastian Pole, an Ayurvedic practitioner who runs Bristol-based firm Pukka Herbs with around 500 employees in India, said his company had been working on obtaining licences for six products at the cost of around US$161,500. 'It's a very onerous process and is going to have a very negative impact on all traditional medicines,' he said. 'Yes, it's good to improve standards but this is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.'

Dr. Shantha Godagama, President, Ayurvedic Medical Association, who sits on the advisory board of the UK's Medicines and Health Care Products Regulatory Agency, said that while change and regulation were necessary in the long term to improve standards, in the short term it would merely reduce choice and hit the smallest firms the hardest. He said that in his time on the advisory committee, not a single application for a herbalist licence had been received.

http://www.hinduismtoday.com/blogs-news/hindu-press-international/ayurvedic-medicines-face-eu-ban/10818.html

NEW YORK, January 28, 2011: Scientists say that meditators may be benefiting from changes in their brains. The researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. The findings will appear in the January 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.

M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants' meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes.

Britta Hoelzel, a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and the study's lead author, said the participants practiced mindfulness meditation, a form of meditation that was introduced in the United States in the late 1970s. It's about bringing the mind back to the here and now, as opposed to letting the mind drift.

It has been hard to pinpoint the benefits of meditation, but a 2009 study suggests that meditation may reduce blood pressure in patients with coronary heart disease. And a 2007 study found that meditators have longer attention spans. Previous studies have also shown that there are structural differences between the brains of meditators and those who don't meditate, although this new study is the first to document changes in gray matter over time through meditation.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

Pesticides Tied to AHDH
http://walkingthefenceline.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/pesticides-tied-to-ahdh/

Pesticides tied to ADHD in children in U.S. study

(Reuters) – Children exposed to pesticides known as organophosphates could have a higher risk of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to a U.S. study that urges parents to always wash produce thoroughly.

Researchers tracked the pesticides’ breakdown products in children’ urine and found those with high levels were almost twice as likely to develop ADHD as those with undetectable levels.

The findings are based on data from the general U.S. population, meaning that exposure to the pesticides could be harmful even at levels commonly found in children’s environment.

“There is growing concern that these pesticides may be related to ADHD,” said researcher Marc Weisskopf of the Harvard School of Public Health, who worked on the study.

“What this paper specifically highlights is that this may be true even at low concentrations.”

Organophosphates were originally developed for chemical warfare, and they are known to be toxic to the nervous system.

There are about 40 organophosphate pesticides such as malathion registered in the United States, the researchers wrote in the journal Pediatrics.

Weisskopf said the compounds have been linked to behavioral symptoms common to ADHD ­ for instance, impulsivity and attention problems ­ but exactly how is not fully understood.

Although the researchers had no way to determine the source of the breakdown products they found, Weisskopf said the most likely culprits were pesticides and insecticides used on produce and indoors.

Garry Hamlin of Dow AgroSciences, which manufactures an organophosphate known as chlorpyrifos, said he had not had time to read the report closely.

But, he added” “the results reported in the paper don’t establish any association specific to our product chlorpyrifos.”

Weisskopf and colleagues’ sample included 1,139 children between 8 and 15 years. They interviewed the children’s mothers, or another caretaker, and found that about one in 10 met the criteria for ADHD, which jibes with estimates for the general population.

After accounting for factors such as gender, age and race, they found the odds of having ADHD rose with the level of pesticide breakdown products.

For a 10-fold increase in one class of those compounds, the odds of ADHD increased by more than half. And for the most common breakdown product, called dimethyl triophosphate, the odds of ADHD almost doubled in kids with above-average levels compared to those without detectable levels.

“That’s a very strong association that, if true, is of very serious concern,” said Weisskopf. “These are widely used pesticides.”

He emphasized that more studies are needed, especially following exposure levels over time, before contemplating a ban on the pesticides. Still, he urged parents to be aware of what insecticides they were using around the house and to wash produce.

“A good washing of fruits and vegetables before one eats them would definitely help a lot,” he said.

(Reporting by Reuters Health, Editing by Belinda Goldsmith)

CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA, April 1, 2011: Last year the world was startled by Julia Roberts' public announcement of her Hinduness, made all the more dramatic coming in the wake of her movie, 'Eat, Pray, Love.' Today, Steve Jobs held a press conference at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino to discuss the rumors he has been quietly following a Hindu path for some eight years.

'I'm here to confirm what you already know,' the world famous CEO began. 'Nor should it come as a surprise to anyone who knows me, knows my travels through India in the yearly years and knows my philosophy of life.' In the mid-70s Steve Jobs took a break from his employer, Atari, and backpacked around India in search of enlightenment. Soon after his return to the US, he and Steven Wozniak launched Apple. His passion for quality and user-friendliness extend, he told one journalist, to his spiritual path.

Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who purchased Hinduism Today last year, has also quietly begun following his Hindu faith. 'Reincarnation is a much better deal than just one life, and I know a good deal when I see one' he explained.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

February 25, 2011: The new annual industry-sponsored report from Friends of the Earth International revealed that cultivation of genetically modified (GM) crops across Europe continues to decline - with an increasing number of national bans, and decreasing numbers of hectares dedicated to GMOs. The report, 'Who Benefits from GM Crops?' revealed that less than 0.06 per cent of European fields are planted with GM crops - a decline of 23 per cent since 2008.

According to the report, seven member states uphold bans on Monsanto's GM maize due to growing evidence of its negative environmental impacts. Three countries have banned BASFs GM potato due to health concerns, immediately after its authorization in spring 2010, and for the first time five member states have sued the European Commission over the authorization of a GM crop. Public opposition to GM food and feed has increased to 61 percent Europe wide.

Mute Schimpf, food campaigner for Friends of the Earth Europe said: 'The widespread opposition to genetically modified crops and foods in Europe continues to rise because consumers and farmers can see that they offer no added value and only additional environmental and health risks.

Globally, the research highlights how even pro-GM Governments in South America have been forced to take steps to mitigate the negative impacts of GMOs on famers, citizens and the environment.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

BOSTON, MA, USA December 15, 2010 : Scientists are now giving serious attention to an idea that yogis have known for centuries: that yoga has a positive effect on your mood. Although it's an ancient mind-body practice, the future of yoga may be in treating mood disorders. For this small study, scientists at the Boston University School of Medicine measured yoga's effect on depression and anxiety versus walking with a brain imaging study. They found that compared to walking, yoga provides a greater improvement in mood, as well as a decrease in anxiety.

Read more on Chanting Hare Krishna HERE:

UNITED KINGDOM, October 27, 2010: The Hindu Forum of Britain (HFB) in hosting the annual Diwali celebrations at the House of Commons. With traditional Hindu prayers and an annukut (Hindu holy offering of food), the program includes traditional Bharatanatyam dances and musical performances. Special guests were Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, Leader of the Opposition Ed Milliband, newly appointed Lord Popat of Harrow, Lord Dholakia and many others.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

MUMBAI, INDIA, November 7, 2010: Obama was dancing around questions in India– figuratively speaking ­ on Sunday, he also participated in some literal dancing, showing off some moves that, to the delight of photographers traveling with him, are likely to provide iconic images of his trip. President Obama danced with students during a Diwali Candle Lighting and Performance, after student dancers doing a show for him implored him to join in.

Earlier, Michelle Obama enthusiastically swayed to Bollywood tunes, to the delight of the Indian media. Her husband, in contrast, gamely joined in.

Indians seemed to have affection and reverence toward Mr. Obama. In interviews, students and faculty members here uniformly spoke kindly of him, praising everything including his respect for “Gandhian principles.” On the question of how he applies those principles, Mr. Obama sounded a note of humility.

“I’m often frustrated by how far I fall short of their example,” he said, referring to Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, all of whom he said he was studying. “But I do think that at my best what I’m trying to do is to apply principles that fundamentally come down to something shared in all the world’s religions, which is to see yourself in other people.”

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

INDIA, November 5, 2010: Julia Roberts thinks the world should celebrate Diwali. The ‘Eat Pray Love’ actress believes the Hindu ‘Festival of Lights’ should be celebrated throughout the world because it celebrates “humanity, peace and prosperity.”

She said: “Diwali should be celebrated unanimously throughout the world as a gesture of goodwill. It not only belongs to Hinduism but is universal in nature and in its essence too. Diwali ignites the values of self-confidence, love for humanity, peace, prosperity and above all eternity which goes beyond all mortal factors.”

The 43-year-old beauty, who recently revealed she was a convert to Hinduism, confesses she has become interested in the spirituality of the faith because it is more than a “mere religion.” She told The Times of India: “Ever since I developed my liking and fondness for Hinduism, I have been attracted and deeply fascinated by many facets of the multi dimensional Hinduism… spirituality in it transcends many barriers of mere religion.”

NEW ZEALAND, April 14, 2011 (Press Release via the Indian Weekender): The second Wellington Region Hindu Conference was held at the Waiwhetu Marae, Lower Hutt, on April 9. The theme of the conference was "Hindu-Maori Perspectives on Holistic Health: From Individual and Whanau to Community".

The two ancient cultures discussed the great amount of similarity in their worldview towards humankind, nature and environment. Based on these deliberations, it was decided to follow up the Ministry of Health to get official recognition for the Hindu system of Yoga as an alternative therapy.

The conference was organized by the Wellington chapter of the Hindu Council of New Zealand, Inc (HCNZ) in co-operation with the Waiwhetu Marae. Maori hosts and Hindu manuhiri got together at the conference at the Marae.

AROGYA (a division of HCNZ) has been offering yoga and pranayam classes in various suburbs of Wellington, and now has plans to train instructors to address the growing popularity of these classes.

Read more about Maori Origins HERE

GUJARAT, INDIA, April 22, 2011: As more and more people take to alternative medicine, ayurveda and naturopathy clinics in the state seem to be growing rapidly. This could be gauged from the fact that such clinics and hospitals in cities like Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Surat have seen their footfalls doubling in the last two years.

Kutch based Swas Healthcare, that runs a chain of naturopathy clinics across the state, is planning to come up with its second hospital within the next six months. Swas now operates a 40-bed hospital at Kharoi in Kutch. Swas also runs two clinics at Ahmedabad, and one each at Surat and Rajkot apart from its hospital in Kutch.

Similarly, Vadodara based Sarvodaya Parivar Mandal Trust which runs a 35-bed naturopathy hospital has seen its wait-list of patients seeking admission more than double from a two-month period around a couple of years ago to four to six months waiting now. The hospital is not only treating patients with common ailments like diabetes and arthritis, but also people with psycho-somatic problems.

Vadodara has seen a spurt in activities in the ayurveda and naturopathy segment, with many NGOs taking up such initiatives as an add-on service they are already providing together with wellness and rejuvenation centers coming up in parts of north Gujarat.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

THE Ganges River, India's heavily polluted spiritual artery, has dropped to alarmingly low levels and begun receding from the historic Varanasi Ghats, which attract millions of pilgrims and tourists each year.

Environmentalists say levels in the upper reaches of the river below the Himalayas, as well as downstream, are several metres lower than they should be at a time when heavy rains and spring melt from Himalayan glaciers normally increase flows.

At Varanasi, the water has receded as much as 3m in some areas from the holy ghats, considered one of the most sacred Hindu spots India.

The blame is being laid at the feet of the country's major hydroelectric projects in the upper reaches of the river, which hoard massive volumes of river flow in dams and barrages. But unregulated water extraction at all points along the 2500km river, for farming, cities, industry and hydroelectricity, has also reached unsustainable levels.

At the Bim Goda barrage alone, outside the Himalayan tourist town of Haridwar, 9 per cent of the river's total flow is believed to be diverted.

The effects of climate change on Himalayan glaciers -- a controversial topic in India -- are also suspected of contributing to the river's reduced flows.

A 2007 UN climate report prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that glaciers feeding the Ganges could disappear by 2030, although that was found to be overly pessimistic.

Some 350 million Indians live along the Ganges, sending millions of litres of raw human and animal waste and industrial run-off into its channel.

At some points Ganges water, supposed to be spiritually cleansing, is said to contain up to 3000 times the recommended safe levels of faecal coliforms.

The federal government has established a National Ganga River Basin Authority to oversee the river's management and rehabilitation. In November, it blocked plans for three new hydro projects.

Environmentalists say that it is not enough. River campaigner M.C. Mehta, who has been fighting a 26-year legal battle with the Indian government to clean up the Ganges, says he is alarmed by the plight of the river.

"The water has receded very dramatically when the water should be increasing because of snow melt and heavy rains," he said yesterday. "In the downstream reaches now there is no flow in the river at all. It's not a good thing. The river has a right to live and a right to sufficient water flows. India is not India without the Ganges."

WASHINGTON, DC, May 31, 2011 (The New York Times): A cognitive neuroscientist, Ellen Bialystok has spent almost 40 years learning about how bilingualism sharpens the mind. Her good news: Among other benefits, the regular use of two languages appears to delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease symptoms. Here are excerpts from her interview:

"There's a system in your brain, the executive control system. It's a general manager. Its job is to keep you focused on what is relevant, while ignoring distractions. It's what makes it possible for you to hold two different things in your mind at one time and switch between them.

"If you have two languages and you use them regularly, the way the brain's networks work is that every time you speak, both languages pop up and the executive control system has to sort through everything and attend to what's relevant in the moment. Therefore the bilinguals use that system more, and it's that regular use that makes that system more efficient."

"On average, the bilinguals showed Alzheimer's symptoms five or six years later than those who spoke only one language. This didn't mean that the bilinguals didn't have Alzheimer's. It meant that as the disease took root in their brains, they were able to continue functioning at a higher level. They could cope with the disease for longer."

"Multitasking is one of the things the executive control system handles. We wondered, "Are bilinguals better at multitasking?" So we put monolinguals and bilinguals into a driving simulator. Through headphones, we gave them extra tasks to do -- as if they were driving and talking on cellphones. We then measured how much worse their driving got. Now, everybody's driving got worse. But the bilinguals, their driving didn't drop as much. Because adding on another task while trying to concentrate on a driving problem, that's what bilingualism gives you."

"Many immigrants choose to teach their children their native language. People e-mail me and say, "I'm getting married to someone from another culture, what should we do with the children?" I always say, "You're sitting on a potential gift. There are two major reasons people should pass their heritage language onto children. First, it connects children to their ancestors. The second is my research: Bilingualism is good for you. It makes brains stronger. It is brain exercise."

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

HAMPI, INDIA, June 16, 2011 (The Pune Mirror): Some of the most impressive structures at the world heritage site at Hampi are in various stages of collapse following unchecked quarrying of granite in the vicinity.

On Sunday, a portion of the famous Varaha temple came crashing down. Regular dynamiting of rocks in the periphery of the Vijayanagar ruins had seriously weakened the structure, and it just took a heavy downpour to do the rest.

The Archaeological Survey of India was conducting restoration work at the Varaha temple complex when the temple wall crumbled. "Granite quarrying is rampant in Bukkasagara, Venkatapura and Gudalkere villages which are situated very near to these monuments.

In May, when the famous Akka Thangi (Sister Stone) collapsed, tourism minister G. Janardhana Reddy visited the site and stated that "quarrying in a six-kilometer radius of Hampi will be banned." But no action has been taken so far by tourism department officials and the district administration.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

Vedic World Heritage links:

See our pages supporting these views HERE:
http://www.hknet.org.nz/VWH.html (Vedik World Heritage)
Western Indologists been exposed page:
http://www.hknet.org.nz/WesternIndologists-page.htm
How British Misguided the World on Vedic History
http://www.hknet.org.nz/MotiveBritishRajMissionaries.html

KATHMANDU, NEPAL, July 2011 (AFP): It must be treasure season. After the fabulous wealth of the Padmanabhaswamy temple, workers renovating a former royal palace in the Nepalese capital have discovered a stash of gold and silver ornaments weighing more than 300 kilograms (661 pounds), the government said Tuesday. Only one of three boxes has been opened so far and its contents would be worth about 17.5 million rupees (US$233,334) on the local gold and silver markets.

The three boxes of treasures, thought to be more than 500 years old, were hidden in a store room under the sprawling 16th-century Hanuman Dhoka palace, a UNESCO world heritage site, a spokesman for the culture ministry said. "There are coins and ornaments that look like offerings to the Gods and Goddesses," he added.

The 4.5-million-rupee government restoration project at the dilapidated palace, which housed Nepal's royals until the late 19th century and is now a museum, began two months ago and will go on until September. The palace in Kathmandu, with intricately carved features and several courtyards, served as a venue for the coronation of the country's kings until the monarchy was abolished three years ago.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

Political Correctness: WHO started it, WHEN, and most importantly WHY!!!

Bill Lind: For the first time in history of the so called modern, refine, advanced and free society, we have to be fearful of what we say, of what we write, and of what we think. We have to be afraid of using the “wrong” words that present word denounces as offensive, insensitive, racist, sexist, or homophobic etc

We have to ask ourselves where does all this labeling that we’ve heard it in the schools on the radio, television, work etc. – the feminism, the gay rights movement, anti-semitism, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demand for compulsory social enculturation, and all the rest of the superimposed social ideologies – where does it come from?

We have always regarded it with some amusement, because it has struck us as so strange that people of modern day would allow a situation to develop whereas they would be afraid of what words they use.

However we now have this situation reoccurring in these modern times. We have it primarily on college campuses, and we see it spreading throughout the whole society. Where does it come from? What is it?

We call it “Political Correctness.” The name originated as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious.

In fact, it’s deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.

If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is Cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms.

It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippie era and the peace movement, as it is commonly believed, but back to World War I.

If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.

First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on modern day college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered “North Koreas”, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local jewish, black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted “victims” groups that Political Correctness revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble.

Within the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges – some star-chamber proceeding – and punishment. That is a little look into the future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.

Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly understood and applied is not an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this philosophy certain things must be true – such as the whole of the history of our culture is the history of the oppression of women.

Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history.

People must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and say, “Wait a minute. This isn’t true. I can see it isn’t true” and consequently power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.

Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production.

Similarly, Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power over the other groups.

Nothing else matters. All literature, indeed, is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing.

Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a-priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil.

In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good – feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, Semites, homosexuals.

These groups are determined to be “victims,” and therefore automatically good, regardless of what any of them say or do (The action of State of Israel against the Palestine is a perfect example whereas the “victims”, become the actual abusers and nobody can say anything-if you do you are automatically labeled bigoted anti-semite). Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.

Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions.

When a white student with superior academic qualifications is denied admittance to a college in favor of a black or Hispanic who isn’t as well qualified, the white student is expropriated. And indeed, affirmative action, in our whole society today, is a system of expropriation.

White owned companies don’t get a contract because the contract is reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So expropriation is a principle tool for both forms of Marxism.

And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. For the classical Marxist, it’s Marxist economics. For the cultural Marxist, it’s deconstruction.

Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-insert/re-interprets any desired meaning. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the racism and suppression of women or the Bible is really about race and gender. All of these texts simply become grist for the mill, which proves that “all history is about whose group have/had power over other groups.”

The parallels are very evident between the classical Marxism that we’re familiar with in the old Soviet Union, and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political Correctness.

But the parallels are not accidents. The parallels did not come from nothing. The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, a history that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small group of academics who have studied this.

The history of Political Correctness goes back to World War I, as do so many of the pathologies that are today bringing our society, and indeed our values, culture, and beliefs down.

Marxist theory said that when the general European war came (as it did come in Europe in 1914), the working class throughout Europe would rise up and overthrow their governments – the bourgeois governments – because the workers had more in common with each other across the national boundaries than they had in common with the bourgeoisie and the ruling class in their own country.

Well, 1914 came and it didn’t happen. Throughout Europe, workers rallied to their flag and happily marched off to fight each other.

The Kaiser shook hands with the leaders of the Marxist Social Democratic Party in Germany and said there are no parties now, there are only Germans. And this happened in every country in Europe. So something was wrong.

Marxists knew by definition it couldn’t be the theory. In 1917, they finally got a Marxist coup in Russia and it looked like the theory was working, but it stalled again, after Poland defended and won, from their attack. When attempts were made to spread it immediately after the war, with the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, the Bela Kun government in Hungary, with the Munich Soviet, the workers still didn’t support them.

So the Marxists’ had a problem, and two Marxist theorists went to work on it: Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary.

Gramsci said the workers will never see their true class interests, as defined by Marxism, until they are freed from Western culture, and particularly from the Christian religion – that they are blinded by culture and religion to their true class interests.

Lukacs, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, said in 1919, “Who will save us from Western Civilization?” He also theorized that the great obstacle to the creation of a Marxist paradise was the culture: Western civilization itself.

Lukacs got a first success, by getting the chance to put his ideas into practice, when the home grown Bolshevik Bela Kun government is established in Hungary in 1919, he becomes deputy commissar for culture, and the first thing he did, was to introduce sex education into the Hungarian schools in the attempt to break down the morals, values, culture and believes.

This ensured that the workers would not support the Bela Kun government, because the Hungarian people looked at this aghast, workers as well as everyone else.

In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes on the role of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, which creates Political Correctness as we know it today.

Essentially it has created the basis for it by the end of the 1930s. This comes about because the very wealthy young son of a Jewish millionaire trader by the name of Felix Weil has become a Marxist with all his wealth at disposal.

He is disturbed by the divisions among the Marxists, so he sponsors something called the First Marxist Work Week, where he brings Lukacs and many of the key German thinkers together for a week, working on the differences of Marxism.

And he proposes, “What we need is a think-tank.” Washington today is full of think tanks and we think of them as very modern. In fact they go back quite a ways.

Felix Weil endows an institute, associated with Frankfurt University, established in 1923, that was originally supposed to be known as the Institute for Marxism.

However people behind it decided at the beginning that it was not to their advantage to be openly identified as Marxist. The last thing Political Correctness wants is for people to figure out it’s a form of Marxism. So instead they decided to name it the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.

Felix Weil is very clear about his goals. In 1971, he wrote to Martin Jay the author of a principle book on the Frankfurt School, as the Institute for Social Research soon becomes known informally, and he said, “I wanted the institute to become known, perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism.” Weil was successful.

The first director of the Institute, Carl Grunberg, an Austrian economist, concluded his opening address, according to Martin Jay, “by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific methodology.” Marxism, he said, would be the ruling principle at the Institute, and that never changed.

Again, Martin Jay writes, “If it can be said that in the early years of its history, the Institute concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois society’s socio-economic sub-structure,” – and I point out that Jay is very sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, – “in the years after 1930 its primary interests lay in its cultural superstructure.

The initial work at the Institute was rather conventional, but in 1930 it acquired a new director named Max Horkheimer, and Horkheimer’s views were very different. He was very much a Marxist maverick.

Horkheimer’s initial unorthodoxy is that he was very interested in Freud, and the key for making the translation of Marxism from economic into cultural terms is that he essentially combined it with Freudism.

Consequently the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship between the two was brought into unification by “Critical Theory.”

“Critical Theory” is the source for the radical feminism, labeled anti-Semitism, the women’s studies departments, the gay studies departments, and the black studies departments etc – all these study departments are branches of the Critical Theory.

What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create the theory called Critical Theory.

The term is ingenious because you’re tempted to ask, “What is the theory?” The theory is to criticize. The critical theory is their way to bring down Western (or any other traditional) culture and the capitalist order by not allowing any alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that.

They zealously argue that it can’t be done, that we can’t imagine what really free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we’re living under repression – the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of sexual repression – we can’t even imagine it.

What Critical Theory about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order, culture, values, and beliefs down. When we hear from the feminists that the whole society is just out to get women, whereas in the reality is only a “banner”, derivative of Critical Theory.

It is imperative to understand that is all originating from the 1930s and not the 1960s as it is commonly misconstrued.

Other key members who join up around that time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse.

Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that’s the sexual element using Freudian psychoanalysis.

Particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of “polymorphous perversity,” that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create.

Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme ideas on the need for sexual liberation, however this school of thought runs through the whole Frankfurt Institute. So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again as in the early 60s.

In Fromm’s view, masculinity and femininity were not reflections of ‘essential’ sexual differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined.” Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct.

Another example is the emphasis we now see on environmentalism. “Materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative dominating attitude toward nature.”

That was Horkhemier writing in 1933 in Materialismus und Moral. “The theme of man’s domination of nature,” according to Jay, ” was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years.”

“Horkheimer’s antagonism to the fetishization of labor, (here’s where they’re obviously departing from Marxist orthodoxy) expressed another dimension of his materialism, the demand for human, sensual happiness.”

In one of his most trenchant essays, Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation, written in 1936, Horkeimer “discussed the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture.” And he specifically referred to the Marquis de Sade, favorably, for his “protest…against asceticism in the name of a higher morality.”
How does all of this engineered political correctness flood the media today? How does it flood into our universities and indeed into our lives today?

The Political Correctness in modern day

The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist; they are also, to a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut down the Institute for Social Research and its members migrated.

They migrated to New York City, and the Frankfurt Institute was reestablished by them in 1933 with help from Columbia University.

The members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s, though many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American society.

There is another very important transition when the war comes. Some of them go to work for the government, including Herbert Marcuse, who became a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some, including Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood.

In 1937, the Rockefeller Foundation with Marcuse began funding research into the social effects of new forms of mass media, particularly radio. Before World War I, radio had been a hobbyist’s toy, with only 125,000 receiving sets in the entire U.S.; twenty years later, it had become the primary mode of entertainment in the country; out of 32 million American families in 1937, 27.5 million had radios ­ a larger percentage than had telephones, automobiles, plumbing, or electricity! Yet, almost no systematic research had been done up to this point.

The Rockefeller Foundation enlisted several leading universities within America, and headquartered this network at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Named the Office of Radio Research, it was popularly known as “the Radio Project.”

The director of the Project was Paul Lazersfeld, the foster son of Austrian Marxist economist Rudolph Hilferding, and a long-time collaborator of the I.S.R. from the early 1930’s. Under Lazersfeld was Frank Stanton, a recent Ph.D. in industrial psychology from Ohio State, who had just been made research director of Columbia Broadcasting System­a grand title but a lowly position.

After World War II, Stanton became president of the CBS News Division, and ultimately president of CBS at the height of the TV network’s power; he also became Chairman of the Board of the RAND Corporation, and a member of President Lyndon Johnson’s “kitchen cabinet.”

Among the Project’s researchers were Herta Herzog, who married Lazersfeld and became the first director of research for the Voice of America; and Hazel Gaudet, who became one of the nation’s leading political pollsters. Theodor Adorno was named chief of the Project’s music section.

Despite the official gloss, the activities of the Radio Project make it clear that its purpose was to test empirically the Adorno-Benjamin thesis that the net effect of the mass media could be to atomize and increase labiality­what people would later call “brainwashing.”

We can see the influence of ‘Radio Project’ today. Look at the public opinion polls, like the television news, have been completely integrated into our society. A “scientific survey” of what people are said to think about an issue can be produced in less than twenty-four hours.

Some campaigns for high political office are completely shaped by polls; in fact, many politicians try to create issues which are rather meaningless, but which they know will look good in the polls, purely for the purpose of enhancing their image as “popular.”
Important policy decisions are made, even before the actual vote of the citizenry or the legislature, by poll results. Newspapers will occasionally write pious editorials calling on people to think for themselves, even as the newspaper’s business agent sends a check to the local polling organization.

The idea of “public opinion” is not new, of course. Plato spoke against it in his Republic over two millenia ago; Alexis de Tocqueville wrote at length of its influence over America in the early nineteenth century. But, nobody thought to measure public opinion before the twentieth century, and nobody before the 1930’s thought to use those measurements for decision-making.

It is useful to pause, contemplate and reflect on the whole concept. The belief that public opinion can be a determinant of truth is philosophically totally insane. It eradicates the idea of the rational individual mind.
Adorno theorized that the counterpart to the fetishism is a regression of listening. This does not mean a relapse of the individual listener into an earlier phase of his own development, nor a decline in the collective general level, since the millions who are reached musically for the first time by today’s mass communications cannot be compared with the audiences of the past.

Rather, it is the contemporary listening which has regressed, arrested at the infantile stage. Not only do the listening subjects lose, along with the freedom of choice and responsibility, the capacity for the conscious perception of music…. They fluctuate between comprehensive forgetting and sudden dives into recognition.

We listen atomistically and dissociate what we hear, but precisely in this dissociation we develop certain capacities which accord less with the traditional concepts of aesthetics than with those of football or motoring.

Adorno states” They are not childlike … but they are childish; their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded”.

This conceptual retardation and preconditioning caused by listening, suggested that programming could determine preference. The very act of putting, say, a Benny Goodman number next to a Mozart sonata on the radio, would tend to amalgamate both into entertaining “music-on-the-radio” in the mind of the listener.

This meant that even new and unpalatable ideas could become popular by “re-naming” them through the universal homogenizer of the culture industry. As Benjamin puts it…
…Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into a progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie.

The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert…. With regard to the screen, the critical and receptive attitudes of the public coincide.

The decisive reason for this is that the individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in the film.

At the same time, the magic power of the media could be used to re-define previous ideas. “Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will all make films,” concluded Benjamin, quoting the French film pioneer Abel Gance, “… all legends, all mythologies, all myths, all founders of religions, and the very religions themselves … await their exposed and re-interpreted resurrection.”

The Adorno-Benjamin analysis represents almost the entire theoretical basis of all the politically correct aesthetic trends which now plague our universities. The Post-structuralism of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, the Semiotics of Umberto Eco, the Deconstructionism of Paul DeMan, all openly cite Benjamin as the source of their work.

Here, originates the potent theories of social control. The great possibilities of this Frankfurt School media work were probably the major contributing factor in the support given the I.S.R. by the bastions of the Establishment, after the Institute transferred its operations to America in 1934.
Today, the men and women who run the networks, the ad agencies, and the polling organizations, even if they have never heard of Theodor Adorno, firmly believe in Adorno’s theory that the media can, and should, turn all they touch into “football.”
Coverage of the two Gulf War`s should make that clear.

These psychoanalytic survey techniques became standard, not only for the Frankfurt School, but also throughout American social science departments, particularly after the I.S.R. arrived in the United States.

The methodology was the basis of the research piece for which the Frankfurt School is most well known, the “authoritarian personality” project. In 1942, I.S.R. director Max Horkheimer made contact with the American Jewish Committee, which asked him to set up a Department of Scientific Research within its organization.

The American Jewish Committee also provided a large grant to study anti-Semitism in the American population. “Our aim,” wrote Horkheimer in the introduction to the study “is not merely to describe prejudice, but to explain it in order to help in its eradication…. Eradication means re-education that is scientifically preplanned (modified) on the basis of understanding scientifically arrived at.”

Readers have undoubtedly heard one or another horror story about how an African-American Studies Department has procured a ban on Othello, because it is “racist,” or how a radical feminist professor lectured at Modern Language Association meeting on the witches as the “true heroines” of Macbeth. There is also the removal from the curriculum of Shakespeare`s Merchant of Venice by the powerful Jewish lobby etc.

These mayhems occur because the perpetrators are able to plausibly demonstrate in the a-priori tradition of Benjamin and Adorno, that Shakespeare’s intent is irrelevant; what is important is the racist or phallocentric “subtext” of which Shakespeare was unconscious when he wrote.

When the local Women’s Studies or Third World Studies Department organizes students to abandon classics in favor of modern Black and feminist authors, the reasons given are pure Benjamin. It is not that these modern writers are better, but they are somehow more truthful because their alienated prose reflects the modern social problems of which the older authors were ignorant!

Students are being taught that language itself is, as Benjamin said, merely a conglomeration of false “names” foisted upon society by its oppressors, and are warned against “logocentrism,” the bourgeois over-reliance on words.

If these campus antics appear “retarded” (in the words of Adorno), that is because they are designed to be.
The Frankfurt School’s most important breakthrough consists in the realization that their monstrous theories could become dominant in the culture, as a result of the changes in society brought about by what Benjamin called “the age of mechanical reproduction of art.”

However these origins of Political Correctness would probably not mean too much to us today except for two subsequent events.

The first was the student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels needed theory of some sort. They couldn’t just get out there and say, “Hell no we won’t go,” they had to have some theoretical explanation behind it.

Very few of them were interested in wading through Das Kapital Classical, economic Marxism, since it is not light, and most of the radicals of the 60s were not deep.

Fortunately for them, and unfortunately the word today, and not just in the university, Herbert Marcuse remained in America when the Frankfurt School relocated back to Frankfurt after the war.

Whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there – when the student rebels come into Adorno’s classroom, he calls the police and has them arrested – Herbert Marcuse, who remained in America, saw the 60s student rebellion as the great chance.

He saw the opportunity to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the New Left in the United States.

One of Marcuse’s books was the key book. It virtually became the bible of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and Civilization.

Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework remains Marxist), repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes – the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed.

He proposes that we can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of “polymorphous perversity,” in which you can “do you own thing.” And by the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play.

What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! They’re students, they’re baby-boomers, and they’ve grown up never having to worry about anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a Masaya writing in a way they can easily follow.

He doesn’t require them to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, “Do your own thing,” “If it feels good do it,” and “You never have to go to work.” By the way, Marcuse is also the person who coined the phrase, “Make love, not war.”

Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines “liberating tolerance” as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left.

The simmering unrest on campus in 1960 might well too have passed or had a positive outcome, were it not for the traumatic decapitation of the nation through the Kennedy assassination, plus the simultaneous introduction of widespread drug use.

Drugs had always been an “analytical tool” of the nineteenth century Romantics, like the French Symbolists, and were popular among the European and American Bohemian fringe well into the post-World War II period. But, in the second half of the 1950’s, the CIA and allied intelligence services began extensive experimentation with the hallucinogen LSD to investigate its potential for social control.

It has now been documented fact, that millions of doses of the chemical were produced and disseminated under the aegis of the CIA’s Operation MK-Ultra.

LSD became the drug of choice within the agency itself, and was passed out freely to friends of the family, including a substantial number of OSS veterans. For instance, it was OSS Research and Analysis Branch veteran Gregory Bateson who “turned on” the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg to a U.S. Navy LSD experiment in Palo Alto, California.

Not only Ginsberg, but novelist Ken Kesey and the original members of the Grateful Dead rock group opened the doors of perception courtesy of the Navy. The guru of the “psychedelic revolution,” Timothy Leary, first heard about hallucinogens in 1957 from Life magazine (whose publisher, Henry Luce, was often given government acid, like many other opinion shapers), and began his career as a CIA contract employee; at a 1977 “reunion” of acid pioneers, Leary openly admitted, “everything I am, I owe to the foresight of the CIA.”

Hallucinogens have the singular effect of making the victim asocial, totally self-centered, and concerned with objects. Even the most banal objects take on the “aura” which Benjamin had talked about, and become timeless and delusionarily profound.

In other words, hallucinogens instantaneously achieve a state of mind identical to that prescribed by the Frankfurt School theories. And, the popularization of these chemicals created a vast psychological labiality for bringing those theories into practice. Thus, the situation at the beginning of the 1960’s represented a brilliant re-entry point for the Frankfurt School, and it was fully exploited.

One of the crowning ironies of the “Now Generation” of 1964 on, is that, for all its protestations of utter modernity and freedom, all of its ideas or artifacts where more than thirty years old and most of the individuals from the new generation has no idea.

The political theory came completely from the Frankfurt School; Lucien Goldmann, a French radical who was a visiting professor at Columbia in 1968, was absolutely correct when he said of Herbert Marcuse in 1969 that “the student movements … found in his works and ultimately in his works alone the theoretical formulation of their problems and aspirations.”

The long hair and sandals, the free love communes, the macrobiotic food, the liberated lifestyles, had been designed at the turn of the century, and thoroughly field-tested by various, Frankfurt School-connected New Age social experiments like the Ascona commune before 1920.

Even Tom Hayden’s defiant “Never trust anyone over thirty,” was merely a less-urbane version of Rupert Brooke’s 1905, “Nobody over thirty is worth talking to.” The social planners who shaped the 1960’s simply relied on already-available materials.

The founding document of the 1960’s counterculture, and that which brought the Frankfurt School’s “revolutionary messianism” of the 1920’s into the 1960’s, was Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization.

It important to note that is was originally published in 1955 and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

The document masterfully sums up the Frankfurt School ideology of Kulturpessimismus in the concept of “dimensionality.” In one of the most bizarre perversions of philosophy, Marcuse claims to derive this concept from Friedrich Schiller. Schiller, whom Marcuse purposefully misidentifies as the heir of Immanuel Kant, discerned two dimensions in humanity: a sensuous instinct and an impulse toward form.

Schiller advocated the harmonization of these two instincts in man in the form of a creative play instinct. For Marcuse, on the other hand, the only hope to escape the one-dimensionality of modern industrial society was to liberate the erotic side of man, the sensuous instinct, in rebellion against “technological rationality.”

As Marcuse would say later (1964) in his One-Dimensional Man, “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.” This erotic liberation he misidentifies with Schiller’s “play instinct,” which, rather than being erotic, is an expression of charity, the higher concept of love associated with true creativity.

Marcuse’s contrary theory of erotic liberation is something implicit in Sigmund Freud, but not explicitly emphasized, except for some Freudian renegades like Wilhelm Reich and, to a certain extent, Carl Jung.

Every aspect of culture in the West, including reason itself, says Marcuse, acts to repress this: “The totalitarian universe of technological rationality is the latest transmutation of the idea of reason.

This erotic liberation should take the form of the “Great Refusal,” a total rejection of the “capitalist” monster and all his works, including “technological” reason, and “ritual-authoritarian language.”

As part of the Great Refusal, mankind should develop an “aesthetic ethos,” turning life into an aesthetic ritual, a “life-style” (a nonsense phrase which came into the language in the 1960’s under Marcuse’s influence).

With Marcuse representing the point of the wedge, the 1960’s were filled with obtuse intellectual justifications of contentless adolescent sexual rebellion.

Eros and Civilization was reissued as an inexpensive paperback in 1961, and ran through several editions; in the preface to the 1966 edition, Marcuse added that the new slogan, “Make Love, Not War,” was exactly what he was talking about: ”
The fight for eros is a political fight [emphasis in original].” In 1969, he noted that even the New Left’s obsessive use of obscenities in its manifestoes was part of the Great Refusal, calling it “a systematic linguistic rebellion, which smashes the ideological context in which the words are employed and defined.”

Marcuse was aided by psychoanalyst Norman O. Brown, his OSS protégé, who contributed Life Against Death in 1959, and Love’s Body in 1966­calling for man to shed his reasonable, “armored” ego, and replace it with a “Dionysian body ego,” that would embrace the instinctual reality of polymorphous perversity, and bring man back into “union with nature.”

The books of Reich, who had claimed that Nazism was caused by monogamy, were re-issued. Reich had died in an American prison, jailed for taking money on the claim that cancer could be cured by rechanneling “orgone energy.”

Primary education became dominated by Reich’s leading follower, A.S. Neill, a Theosophical cult member of the 1930’s and militant atheist, whose educational theories demanded that students be taught to rebel against teachers who are, by nature, authoritarian.

Neill’s book Summer hill sold 24,000 copies in 1960, rising to 100,000 in 1968, and 2 million in 1970; by 1970, it was required reading in 600 university courses, making it one of the most influential education texts of the period, and still a benchmark for recent writers on the subject.

Marcuse led the way for the complete revival of the rest of the Frankfurt School theorists, re-introducing Lukacs the long-forgotten idea from 1920 - sex education to America.

Indeed, the eroticism of the counterculture meant much more than free love and a violent attack on the nuclear family.
It also meant the legitimization of philosophical eros. People were trained to see themselves as objects, determined by their “natures.” The importance of the individual as a person gifted with the divine spark of creativity, and capable of acting upon all human civilization, was replaced by the idea that the person is important because he or she is black, or a woman, or feels homosexual impulses.

This explains the deformation of the civil rights movement into a “black power” movement, and the transformation of the legitimate issue of civil rights for women into feminism.

Discussion of women’s civil rights was forced into being just another “liberation cult,” complete with bra-burning and other, sometimes openly Astarte-style, rituals; a review of Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970) and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1971), demonstrates their complete reliance on Marcuse, Fromm, Reich, and other Freudian extremists.

This popularization of life as an erotic, pessimistic ritual did not abate, but in fact deepened over the twenty years leading to today; it is the basis of the horror we see around us.

The heirs of Marcuse and Adorno completely dominate the universities, teaching their own students to replace reason with “Politically Correct” ritual exercises. There are very few theoretical books on arts, letters, or language published today in the United States or Europe which do not openly acknowledge their debt to the Frankfort School.

The witchhunt on today’s campuses is merely the implementation of Marcuse’s concept of “repressive toleration”­”tolerance for movements from the left, but intolerance for movements from the right”­enforced by the students of the Frankfurt School, who become today`s professors of women’s studies and Afro-American studies.

The most erudite spokesman for Afro-American studies, for instance, Professor Cornell West of Princeton, publicly states that his theories are derived from Georg Lukacs.

At the same time, the ugliness so carefully nurtured by the Frankfurt School pessimists has corrupted our highest cultural endeavors. One can hardly find a performance of a Mozart opera, which has not been utterly deformed by a director who, following Benjamin and the I.S.R., wants to “liberate the erotic subtext.”

You cannot ask an orchestra to perform Schönberg and Beethoven on the same program, and maintain its integrity for the latter. And, when our highest culture becomes impotent, popular culture becomes openly bestial.

One final image: American and European children daily watch films like Nightmare on Elm Street and Total Recall, or television shows comparable to them. A typical scene in one of these will have a figure emerge from a television set; the skin of his face will realistically peel away to reveal a hideously deformed man with razor-blade fingers, fingers which start growing to several feet in length, and­suddenly­the victim is slashed to bloody ribbons.

This is not entertainment. This is the deeply paranoid hallucination of the LSD acid head. The worst of what happened in the 1960’s is now daily fare. Owing to the Frankfurt School and its co-conspirators, the West is on a “bad trip” from which it is not being allowed to come down.

In conclusion, world today is in the threshold of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. America and the world is becoming an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power of the state.

Due to these “political anti-correctness hate crimes” we now have people serving jail sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to expand that category ever further.

Affirmative action is part of it. The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it.

It’s exactly what we have seen happen in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now it’s inculcating the rest of the world, and we don’t recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it off.

The message today is that it’s not funny, it’s here, it’s growing and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything that we have ever defined as traditional legacy, culture, values, morals, and especially our religious/spiritual beliefs.

Unfortunately, spiritual institution ISKCON is not exempt from the attacks on its spiritual values, morals, and beliefs by the hands of Political Correctness. Look at your professed ‘leaders’, and many other prominent and vocal academically conditioned devotees.

See, for what these professed leaders stand today; politically correct gay’s marriages, politically correct religious pluralism in the form of religious syncretism, politically correct demands for systematic toning down and interpretation of books from Acharya`s, and Srila Prabhupada. The rational and pragmatical demand to use our own sense perception and reason in the form of politically correct critical theory to stroke our ego and fell better about it.. (ISKCON education is the perfect example; ­ replacement of gurukula system for the secular government education), the Freudian pop psychology in the form of dubious Satvatove etc…

If you collectively fail to indentify this enemy, namely Political Correctness, it will destroy (ISKCON) spiritual institution as it purpose is to destroy traditional culture, values, morals, and spiritual beliefs from within. Recommended article to read is……and you will get better understanding how they are doing it.

by Bill Lind, Chicago

Note from Sri Prahlada

January has been a wonderful month for kirtan in Sydney. On the 22nd and 23rd, we had a 40 hour kirtan celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Hare Krishna community in Sydney and Australia. One of the highlights was a performance by Swamis from Satyananda Yoga at Mangrove Mountain. Another highlight was the kirtans performed by Gaura Vani and his USA based group As Kindred Spirits. They are currently on tour in Australia and I had the fortune of attending each of the group's six concerts in Sydney. I have a particular affection for these kirtan musicians as lead singer Gaura Vani and bass player Shree Shyam and I all went to school together in 1980s at an ashram in Vrindavan India.

In January we also had the opportunity to share kirtan on the Lily World stage for each of the two days of the "Big Day Out"™ in Sydney. It was a different environment to that of a peaceful Yoga School, so we kept the tempo more upbeat. Despite the 40+ degree heat, hundreds of people danced in front of the stage. After the second day, I asked two girls who had been dancing ecstatically in front of the stage how they liked the kirtan. They replied they had never experienced anything so wonderful and blissful as kirtan. They said that although it was over 40 degrees, they had goose bumps all over the bodies from the chanting!

So, just what happens to people in kirtan? This is the focus of this issue of Kirtan Magic, covered in our feature article entitled "What are the Benefits of Kirtan?"?. Please enjoy and feel free to get involved by commenting below, and of course I hope to meet you soon at one of our upcoming kirtan events!

With affection,
Om & Prem
Sri Prahlada

What are the Benefits of Kirtan?

Recently, I was asked to explain the benefits of kirtan to the owner of a yoga school who was considering organizing a kirtan concert. My response was that in kirtan people experience:

•Inner peace
•Happiness <
•Opening of the heart with feelings of love andd compassion
•Connection with the Divine and oother kirtan participants
•On occasioon, goose bumps and tears as the heart jumps with joy

I then offered that there were three authorities from which to understand the benefits of kirtan:

1.Personal experience
2.Academic research findings
3.The authority of Vedic-yoga texts.

Personal experience

Most kirtan authorities share that the benefits of kirtan cannot be explained in words, it has to be experienced in order to be understood. How do you explain the taste of a mango to someone who has never tasted these fruits? You can intellectualise over the taste by saying its something like a cross between a peach, pineapple, and an orange, but until a person tastes a mango, they can never really know it’s flavour. The same is with the experience of kirtan – you have to expperience it to know what it is. Sacinandana Swami put it eloquently when he wrote: "Words can show us the direction in which to look for the kirtan-experience, but only when you sit down, move towards your inner space, and then sing out, will you start to know what kirtan really is. Because at that time your soul will rise up and start to dance…"?
Another thing is that different people will experience kirtan differently. Some people might immediately love it, like meeting a long lost friend or returning home after a long time away. Others might take a little while to get used to an unfamiliar experience. Additionally, kirtan can often sound raw and unpolished. Hence, some might find the mango a little green – immature and therefore unpalatable. But inn India, people love green mangos (eaten with salt and chilli powder pickled) as much as they love ripe mangos. They can also discern between different varieties of mangos – some are sweeter and others have a slighttly bitter taste, others stringy, and others are more or less firm. Similarly, a kirtan connoisseur can discern and appreciate different varieties and flavours of kirtan.

My personal experience of kirtan is that when the lead chanter and the group participants are sincere and sing from the heart with devotion – there is nothing in the world that has the power to move and uplift me like kirtan. When I look back on my life, my happiest, most blissful moments, were all in kirtan.

Academic research findings

In the past several years, with the increasing awareness and appreciation of kirtan in the Western yoga community, it has also come to attract the attention of academic researchers. In the USA, Black and Vaugn made kirtan the focus of their Masters theses (respectively in music and psychology), while Cooke made it the focus of her PhD in music. Each of these qualitative studies involved interviews with kirtan participants. Interestingly, three similar themes emerged relating to the benefits of kirtan. In each study it was found that kirtan:

1.Induces a powerful sense of connection with the Divine.
2.Induces trance like meditative states of altered consciousness, including feeling of spiritual upliftment that last long after the kirtan event has concluded.
3.Opens the heart, allowing greater connection and community amongst other kirtan participants, even those of diverse backgrounds and traditions.

The teachings of the Vedic-yoga texts

Interestingly, study of the Vedic-yoga texts reveals similar themes, but describes the benefits of kirtan at a deeper level. This is a level that is not consciously perceptible to the senses. My analysis of the Vedic-yoga texts unveils five themes:

1.The first benefit is that kirtan chanting destroys negativity. The Yoga Sutras (1.27-31) state that chanting om destroys "disease, procrastination, laziness, doubt, pain, nervousness, and lamentation"?. According to the Vedic-yoga tradition, such negative conditions as disease, and mental distress are the result of deeper negative psychological impressions from unwholesome actions performed even in previous lifetimes – bad karma. Therefore, the more important benefit of kirtan is that it destroys the seeds of negativity waiting to sprout as the result of negative karma from previous lifetimes. In this regard, the Brhad-vishnu Purana goes as far as saying that chanting one holy name destroys more negative karma than a person is able to commit. It is natural that when a person is free from the burden of negativity they will be peaceful and happy. This leads us to¦

2.The second benefit is that it awakens blissfulness or natural joy within the heart. Arjuna declares in the Bhakgavad-gita (11.36), "the world becomes joyful upon hearing your name"?.

3.The third benefit of kirtan is that it is easy to perform. The Skanda Purana states that chanting the name of Hari (a name of the Divine which means one who takes away all distress) just once, guarantees liberation. Because it is easy, it is also described as the most practical method for attaining spiritual perfection, particularly in this age, hence…

4.The fourthh benefit is that it is described as the topmost spiritual process. The Srimad Bhagavatam describes kirtan as the "ultimate spiritual practice"? (6.3.22) and as the "doubtless and fearless way of success"? (2.1.11) in any endeavour – spiritual or material. Similarly, Bhagavad-gita (10.25) describes it as the topmost form of sacrifice.

5.Finally, the fifth benefit of kirtan is that it creates Divine connection, which is the greatest of all benefits. This connection transpires both as the experience of Divine presence and as the awakening loving affection. Regarding the experience of Divine presence, Krishna tells Narada in the Padma Purana; “My dear Narada, actually I do not reside in my abode, Vaikuntha, nor do I reside in the heart of the yogis, but I reside in that place where devotees sing my holy names�.

The loving affection that awakens in the heart during kirtan is mutual both for the chanter and the Divine. The chanter comes to love the Divine, as Arjuna tells Krishna in in the Bhagavad-gita (10.25) that when people hear Your name “everyone becomes attached to you�. Likewise, the Divine comes to loves the chanter ever more. In this regard Krishna declares in the Adi Purana, "When a person chants My name, whether out of devotion or indifference, then the chanters name will remain forever in My heart. I will never forget such a soul"?.

So you can see, the benefits of kirtan described in the Vedic-yoga texts is similar to those people explain from their personal experience, but it goes further by describing benefits at a level that is beyond the purview of our limited sensory perception.

For example, while people describe that kirtan relieves distress and induces a state of peace. The Vedic-yoga texts reveal, however, that the effects of kirtan destroy negative karma even from previous lives that is yet un-manifest.

Similarly, while people describe a felt sense of spiritual connection. The yoga texts reveal that this connection is mutual and reciprocated by the Divine, who “will never forget” the name of the person who chants the holy name.

The teachings of Chaitanya

Chaitanya is the personality who 500 years ago, revolutionised spirituality in India by promoting kirtan as the easiest and most practical path to enlightenment. He wrote eight stanzas of spiritual instruction called the Shikshastakam. The first of these stanzas summarises the teachings of the Vedic-yoga texts by describing seven benefits to chanting similar those described above. These are that kirtan:

1.Cleanses the heart of all sinful impressions and desires
2.Destroys all suffering by ending the cycle of birth and death
3.Awakens all auspiciousness and good fortune
4.Reveals knowledge of ones true spiritual nature and relationship with the Divine
5.Awakens the highest bliss
6.Delivers the nectar of immortality
7.Allows one to share the highest Divine love by purifying one of all selfish desires for personal pleasure.

Conclusion

In conclusion, analysis of people's personal experience as well as the Vedic-yoga teachings reveals that kirtan offers wonderful material, emotional, and spiritual benefits – forr body, mind, and spirit. Sometimes kirtan is compared to India's legendary kalpa-vrksa "wish-tree"?, which can grant wishes. So why limit our comparison of kirtan to a mango which must be experienced to know its flavour? A wish-tree can deliver pineapples, coconuts, and anything else you might desire.

What benefits have you gained from kirtan? What are your most memorable kirtan moments? Please visit our blog to share your experiences!

Want To Use This Article?

You’re welcome to share this article as long as you include this complete blurb with it:
For more kirtan articles, music samples & downloads, event news, and short films and other kirtan resources visit http://www.sriprahlada.com and become a member of Sri Prahlada's Kirtan Community for FREE. Aside from instant access to a lot of fantastic kirtan resources, you will also receive Sri Prahlada's e-newsletters with news, realizations, and experiences with kirtan.

Read more on Harinaam Kirtan HERE

New Delhi/Thiruvananthapuram: The Supreme Court has ordered that Rs. 90,000 crores worth of treasure found at a Kerala temple will now be filmed and photographed.

The statues, some made in gold, and a jaw-dropping array of jewels have been discovered at the 16th-century Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple in Thiruvananthapuram.(Kerala temple treasure: Should God's riches be used for public good?)

The vaults of the temple, sealed for close to 150 years, according to some estimates, have been opened on the instructions of the Supreme Court after a local city lawyer alleged poor security and mismanagement by the trust that handles the temple.  (See Pics)

Much of the treasure is believed to have been deposited by the royal family of Travancore. After Independence, descendants of the royal family continue to control the temple, which honours Lord Vishnu. (Forum: What should be done with Kerala temple treasure?)

The inventory of the treasure is being supervised by two former judges of the Kerala High Court, appointed observers by the Supreme Court. Representatives of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and members of the temple trust were also present as the vaults were unsealed. The Supreme Court reprimanded one of the observers for speaking to the media.

The Supreme Court also said today that it wants to appoint an expert to suggest ways in which the treasure can be preserved. It will give further directions on Friday on this matter.

Read more at: http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/kerala-temple-treasure-will-be-filmed-says-supreme-court-117086&cp

INDIA, July 2011, (by Meena Menon): Apa Sherpa is in Mumbai for the 10th Girimitra Sammelan, an annual gathering of mountaineers. He is a veteran mountaineer, who dropped out of school at 12 to work as a porter for expeditions to support his family. Now 51, Apa Sherpa said his 21st climb to the world's highest mountain would be his last. He currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, and teaches climbing skills. However, his association with Mt. Everest would continue along with Dawa Steven Sherpa, who has been part of the Eco Everest Expedition since 2008 to clean up the mountain.

They have recovered five dead bodies and 33 tons of waste. He is also planning a clean-up expedition along the entire Himalayan Range in Nepal. Climate change has been most visible to climbers like Apa Sherpa who have noticed big changes since 2008. "Now the snow has reduced and it has become very dangerous especially on the Hilary Step, before the Everest summit. When you wear crampons for the snow and suddenly encounter rock, it gets very slippery," he says.

Since 2007 the ice pinnacles in the Everest area have reduced in height and at the advanced base camp, there has been flowing water in the climbing season, a clear indication that ice is melting. "You no longer have to melt ice to drink water," says Dawa Steven Sherpa. He too noted that the glacial Imja lake was growing bigger. It is upstream of the Everest Base Camp and above major village settlements. "Imja and its potential threat are in the forefront of everyone's mind since the devastation could be huge," he fears.

Apa Sherpa saw his entire village washed away in a massive glacial lake outburst flood of the Dig Tsho (Tsho-lake), in the western section of the Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park, Khumbu HImal, on August 4, 1985.

Lakhs of devotees and tourists flocked to Orissa's Jagannath Temple in Puri as the annual chariot festival or Rath Yatra began on Sunday.

All the rituals have began almost on scheduled time, Laxmidhar Pujapanda, the public relations officer of Jagannath Temple, said.

The festival marks the journey of three Hindu deities - Jagannath, brother Balabhadra and sister Subhadra from the 12th century Jagannath temple, about 56km from state capital here. They are carried in three splendid wooden chariots, pulled by devotees, to the Gundicha temple, about two kilometres away.

Half a million devotees had reached Puri by 8am, Pujapanda said.

"The weather is conducive and we hope by evening, the numbers could swell to more than a million," he said.

The ceremonial processions of the deities known as Pahandi (carrying the deities out of the temple to the chariots) started at 8.35am, he added.

Chariot pulling was likely to start at 3pm, he said

The festival culminates nine days later when the deities make their way back home to the Jagannath temple in their return journey known as Bahuda Yatra. A glimpse of the deities on the chariot is considered to be very auspicious.

The state government has made elaborate arrangements in the town to prevent any untoward incident. Thousands of policemen have been deployed to maintain law and order. Closed circuit security cameras have been installed at various places to keep a watch on troublemakers and manage crowds.

Sniffer dogs, bomb detection and disposal squads and fire tender units have been stationed to meet emergencies, a police officer said.

At least 56 special trains are running from different parts of Orissa, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh to meet the extra rush of passengers to Puri during the festival, the Bhubaneswar headquartered East Coast Railway said.

INDIA, July 2011 (The Hindu): Developmental pressure on forests and their unscrupulous exploitation have caused "severe depletion" of Himalayan medicinal wealth, a government report said and warned that the situation would go worse if corrective steps are not taken.

A report submitted to the Environment Ministry also said encouraging commercial cultivation is vital for the success of medicinal plants sector to meet the ever growing demand for "temperate medicinal plants".

This medicinal wealth, which occupies an important place in Vedic treatise, has been depleting continuously for the last two decades in their natural habitat, said the report by the Himalayan Forest Research Institute, adding that the depletion of medicinal plants resource base is affecting the health and livelihood options of the people.

According to the report, "more than 800 valuable medicinal species found in the north-western Himalayan region of India is extensively used by the locals since time immemorial for curing various diseases of humankind." "It is now a well known fact that medicinal plants sector possesses great potential to uplift the economy of this part of India," it said.

By Vandana Shiva for Organic Consumers Association on 6 Nov 2010

Recently, I was visiting Bhatinda in Punjab because of an epidemic of farmers suicides. Punjab used to be the most prosperous agricultural region in India. Today every farmer is in debt and despair. Vast stretches of land have become water-logged desert. And as an old farmer pointed out, even the trees have stopped bearing fruit because heavy use of pesticides have killed the pollinators - the bees and butterflies.

And Punjab is not alone in experiencing this ecological and social disaster. Last year I was in Warangal, Andhra Pradesh where farmers have also been committing suicide. Farmers who traditionally grew pulses and millets and paddy have been lured by seed companies to buy hybrid cotton seeds referred to by the seed merchants as "white gold", which were supposed to make them millionaires. Instead they became paupers.

Their native seeds have been displaced with new hybrids which cannot be saved and need to be purchased every year at high cost. Hybrids are also very vulnerable to pest attacks. Spending on pesticides in Warangal has shot up 2000 per cent from $2.5 million in the 1980s to $50 million in 1997. Now farmers are consuming the same pesticides as a way of killing themselves so that they can escape permanently from unpayable debt.

The corporations are now trying to introduce genetically engineered seed which will further increase costs and ecological risks. That is why farmers like Malla Reddy of the Andhra Pradesh Farmers' Union had uprooted Monsanto's genetically engineered Bollgard cotton in Warangal.

On March 27th, 25 year old Betavati Ratan took his life because he could not pay pack debts for drilling a deep tube well on his two-acre farm. The wells are now dry, as are the wells in Gujarat and Rajasthan where more than 50 million people face a water famine.

The drought is not a "natural disaster". It is "man-made". It is the result of mining of scarce ground water in arid regions to grow thirsty cash crops for exports instead of water prudent food crops for local needs.

It is experiences such as these which tell me that we are so wrong to be smug about the new global economy. I will argue in this lecture that it is time to stop and think about the impact of globalisation on the lives of ordinary people. This is vital to achieve sustainability.

Seattle and the World Trade Organisation protests last year have forced everyone to think again. Throughout this lecture series people have referred to different aspects of sustainable development taking globalisation for granted. For me it is now time radically to re-evaluate what we are doing. For what we are doing in the name of globalisation to the poor is brutal and unforgivable. This is specially evident in India as we witness the unfolding disasters of globalisation, especially in food and agriculture.

Who feeds the world? My answer is very different to that given by most people.

Read more: http://news.iskcon.org/node/3255/2010-11-13/globalization_destroys_rural_communities_worldwide#ixzz15DOR29tl

BHUBANESWAR, INDIA, June 15, 2011 (mangalorean.com): Over 200,000 devotees from various parts of the country converged in Orissa's temple town of Puri Wednesday and witnessed the bathing ritual of three Deities that precedes the famous chariot festival or Rath Yatra, an official said.

The Deities -- Lord Jagannath, his elder brother Balabhadra and sister Subhadra -- were taken out of the sanctum sanctorum of the 12th century Jagannath temple in a ceremonial procession to the snana mandap - a bathing platform inside the temple complex. As part of the ritual, the deities were bathed with 108 pitchers of aromatic water drawn out from a temple well known as the golden well.

The Rath Yatra is the grand culmination of a series of celebrations involving the deities. This year, the festival will be held July 3-11. The festival marks the annual journey of the three Deities from the Jagannath temple, 56 km from here, in three separate decorated wooden chariots to another temple about two km away. The Gods return to their abode in the same splendidly decorated chariots which thousands of devotees pull with the help of ropes.

I happenned to understand that unless we simplify our dietary habits, it is not possible to achieve self-sufficiency in our village community projects and it is not possible to become simple. Our conditioning with opulent food that comes from three thousand different destinations is what we look to replicate in our agricultural practices. Even if by some intelligent arrangement if this is possible, we loose the purpose - the simplicity. How much true is Srila Prabhupada’s statement - “Use ONLY what you produce, produce ONLY what you need”!

Our conditioning, thanks to “Green revolution” and other ongoing efforts by corporates and corrupt governments combined, is due to brainwashing about nutrition, diet and supplements. But when we go back to nature, everything makes sense. The first thing to do is willing to simplify our diet.

Simplifying our diet has a rippling effect. It affects all the other aspects of life; not just health, but everything from food preparation, food storage, fuel consumption, kitchen design, the amount of money we may require, the kind of clothes we need, medical bills, transportation expenses, time spent away from home - it’s totally mind boggling when we realize how everything links back to our food choices.

Simplifying food habit means to just make nutritionally enough of food that we consume to keep the body and soul together. What we will need is nutrituous food and very little of it at regulated time.

The problem today is not wholesome food, too much of it and at unregulated time. It is expensive too! It is difficult to grow and process! It’s time to get to simplicity basics.

“In Kali-yuga, the duration of life is shortened not so much because of insufficient food but because of irregular habits. By keeping regular habits and eating simple food, any man can maintain his health. Overeating, over-sense gratification, overdependence on another’s mercy, and artificial standards of living sap the very vitality of human energy. Therefore the duration of life is shortened.” Srila Prabhupada, purport to Srimad Bhagavatam - 1.1.10

Let us make no mistake. Foods that are available today, including milk and its products, are highly and abominably adulterated. They are there to make profits. Apart from the high pesticide content in the food they are not nutritious.

BREAKING THE NUTRITION MYTH:

Nutrition value does not lie in the food that we eat. Today, nutritionists increasingly recognize that vitamins, proteins, etc., are just fragmented compounds, not whole foods. The body does not recognize vitamins as food.

According to ayurveda, the natural and wholesome lactovegetarian food offerred to the jatharagni (fire of digestion represeting Supreme lord, Krishna) consumes the food to provide required nutrition for the body.

“The power of assimilation which is the prerogative of the stomach only is an emblem of divine energy. The divine energy in the stomach has been designated as ‘Vaiswanara’ or an energy of intense heat representing the inconceivable power of Godhead, Krishna. Incubation of heat generated in the stomach cannot be produced artificially in the physical laboratory of the material scientist. This ‘Vaiswanara’ is the vital power in the body. The vitamin therapy of foodstuff is dependant on the ‘Vaiswanara’ heat. The vitamins are produced by the heat and it is not that there is vitamin in the foodstuff offered to the stomach. This Vaiswanara heat produces different qualities of vitamin at different places. The Vaiswanara heat in the stomach of a cow produces different vitaminous energy from the one which is produced in the stomach of a human being. For example, fragments of straw itself has no vitamin value by chemical analysis but when it is put into the stomach of a cow, straw produces enormous volumes of vitamin ‘D’ and ‘A’ while the same straw put into the stomach of a human being will cause starvation to death. That is the inconceivable power of the Supreme Lord.”

“Foolish people think vitamin value of foodstuff in their own way and push into the stomach all sorts of rubbish thing thinking that ‘Vaiswanara’ heat, representative of the Supreme Lord, will accept any such rubbish thing for assimilation. The case is different. The ‘Vaiswanara’ representative power of Godhead in the stomach of the human being can accept only leaves, flower, fruits of the vegetable group and pure water and milk for vitaminising the human energy. The mouth being the entrance door to the region of the stomach, it must guard the tongue of every human being to acquire the quality of a Brahmana, who can accept only foodstuff of ‘Satwik’ quality.”

Back To Godhead, Volume 3, Part , “Yajna, or sacrifice for the supreme”, May
20,1956

Nutritious food is that which has not been tampered with in any way. It has not been processed, bottled, boxed, frozen, canned, heat-treated, preserved, electrocuted, injected with hormones or anti-biotics, sprayed, colored, thickened, pasteurized, defoliated, fumigated, radiated, gassed, waxed, stamped, stapled or whatever. So what does that leave? It leaves only basic, whole foods, such as brown rice, whole wheat, millet, oats, buckwheat, organic fruit, organic vegetables, nuts, leafy green vegetables and herbs, milk and its products. That’s about it.

“Now, there are so many scientists. They are discovering vitamin value from foodstuff. Now, what is the vitamin value in the dry grass? Can any scientist say that this is the vitamin value in dry grass? If there is no vitamin value in dry grass, how the cow is producing so much milk, who is full of vitamins A and D? How, from dry grass, vitamins coming out? Nowadays the physician prescribes some artificial vitamins for maintaining your body. Now, what is the vitamin there in the dry grass so that the cow is eating dry grass and giving you nice milk full of vitamins A and D, essential for your life? So these are all wrong theories, that “This contains this vitamin. This contains this.” Let them go on. But natural foodstuff which is meant for human being, they are full of vitamins already there by nature’s law, by God’s wish. So annad bhavanti bhutani [Lecture, Bg. 3.14].”

Raw food is simply that which keeps the nutrition intact. Ayurveda recommends a balanced diet. Diet is balanced if it contains six types of tastes - madhu, katva, amla, lavana, tikta and kasaya. Also, four types of food - carvya, cusya, lehya and peya-prasada that is chewed, prasada that is licked, prasada tasted with the tongue, and prasada that is drunk.

“According to the Vedic system, there are two classes of food. One is called raw food, and the other is called cooked food. “Raw food” does not indicate raw vegetables and raw grains but food boiled in water, whereas cooked food is made in ghee. Capatis, dhal, rice and ordinary vegetables are called raw foods, as are fruits and salads. But puris, kachoris, samosas, sweet balls and so on are called cooked foods.”
(KRSNA, The Supreme Personality of Godhead, Chap 82)

The best way to eat is more percentage of whole raw foods than cooked. Raw foods satisfy hunger and so we need less! So simple diet will also help us eat frugally because it is nutritionally fulfilling.

Hari Bhakti Vilasa also gives detailed steps to honour prasada. First one must taste sweet a little bit and then start with other food. The food should end with buttermilk (unlike sweet that we usually do). This method also establishes complete nutrition to the body. One must also sip water little during honouring the prasada. However, one should not drink water just before beginning or at the end of prasada. This will destroy the fire in the stomach. One must say prayers or atleast chant Hare Krsna Maha Mantra before and after the prasada. However at the end one must rub the belly while saying the prayers.

Also, before one honours prasada, one must clean their feet, hands and face. Sitting on the ground or squatting is best to honour prasada and not on the chairs and dining table. This sitting position helps to sense whether our stomach is full or not. Else, we may overeat. Eating just right and frugally is the key for simplicity. With this formula we do not even waste Krsna prasada.

EATING FRUGALLY - MILLETS THE MAGIC FOOD: To practice any kind of yoga, there is no other way than to adopt to simplicity dietary habit. Because practising yoga means to control senses starting with the tongue. Therefore, eating less and fasting are two very important processes.

bhala na khaibe ara bhala na paribe hrdayete radha-krsna sarvada sevibe “Do not eat luxurious dishes or dress in fine garments, but always remain humble and serve Their Lordships Sri Sri Radha-Krsna in your heart of hearts.”

Eating once or twice is best to practice yoga. Also, eating frugally is intimately connected to keeping purity of thought and cleanliness outside.

“Suci, saucam, suci. So the devotee must be clean, inside and outside, both. Outside cleaning by taking bath, washing the body with oil or soap or soda, and inside, inside, materially, there will be no unclean things, stool, unnecessary stool. That means one must evacuate every morning and evening. If we eat more, then we have to evacuate twice. But if we eat less, then once evacuation is sufficient. It is said, yogi, bhogi, and rogi. Yogi means spiritually advanced, and bhogi means materialist, and rogi means diseased. It is a common saying. A yogi evacuates only once. That is yogi. And bhogi, because he eats more, so he evacuates twice. And one who evacuates more than twice, he’s rogi, diseased. Yogi, bhogi, rogi. So everything has got routine work. saucam. So you’ll feel healthy. If you have evacuated nicely, you have washed inside and outside, taken your bath, then you’ll feel always refreshed. And unless you feel refreshed, you cannot very nicely chant Hare Krsna maha-mantra or serve Krsna. Therefore cleanliness is required.”

Srila Prabhupada, Lecture, Srimad Bhagavatam, 1.16.26-30, Hawaii, Jan 23,
1974

“Reducing the eating process is very helpful in the matter of sense control. And without sense control there is no possibility of getting out of the material entanglement.” Bhagavad-gita 4.29

Overeating causes problems such as “amla pitta” or acidity. While not eating at all might cause ulcers. Eating light and right is what we can define as frugal diet.

“By overeating, an ordinary human being becomes prone to a disease called amla-pitta, which is a product of indigestion characterized by acidity of the stomach. Damayanti thought that such a condition would afflict Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu.” Srila Prabhupada, purport, Chaitanya Caritamrta, Antya 10.20

Millets are magic food. There are around 7000 millets reported all over the world. Before green revolution, the staple diet for Indians was millets and less of rice or wheat.

Bajra for example is widely used in Rajasthan even today. Bajra roti and butter twice a day forms their diet. People still work hard in the fields and ksatriyas fight hard on the battlefield.

Ragi for example is a magic wholesome food. In south India, farmers work whole day with one ragi ball and little ghee and rasam.

Growing these millets are very easy too. They are disease resistant unlike cereals like rice and wheat. Hence they do not require any pesticide. For unknown reasons, GMO companies have not bothered to tamper with them as yet. So original seeds are still available. Paleoethnobotanists note that millet based diet was prevalent all over the world some 100 years back.

Our food today is poisonous. Ayurveda recommends to make our food as medicine. Turning to wholesome, natural, organic, lacto vegetarian and home grown food offerred with love to Krsna and consumed frugally at regular time is what I want to do as a noble son of Srila Prabhupada for simple living - high thinking.

By Bharat Chandra das BRS - NC Varnashrama Dharma (VAD) Ministry -  ISKCON

Fruit - and vegetables contain the key chemical
The presence of a key chemical in fruits and vegetables may explain why vegetarians are protected against heart disease.

The foods contain called salicylic acid which is a key ingredient in aspirin.

Aspirin is prescribed to reduce the risk of heart attacks.

It is also thought to help prevent bowel, breast and lung cancers, and perhaps Alzheimer's disease.

Vegetarians are already known to have less heart disease and bowel cancer than meat-eaters.

But this study, carried out by scientists at Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary, in Dumfries, looked at whether salicylic acid was the key.

Comparisons

The researchers looked at blood samples from 37 vegetarians and 39 meat and fish-eaters, all in their early 40s, from a Buddhist monastery and the community who were not taking aspirin.

They also examined samples taken from 14 diabetic patients in their late 50s who were taking 75mg of aspirin every day.

They found levels of salicylic acid were up to 12 times higher in vegetarians than in non-vegetarians.

But the average level for vegetarians was still significantly lower than that of the diabetic patients.

However, the scientists did find an overlap between the two groups, with eight vegetarians having higher concentrations of salicylic acid than the lowest found in the aspirin-taking group.

Six of the diabetics had concentrations lower than the highest level amongst the vegetarians.

But the researchers point out in their study, published in the Journal of Clinical Pathology, that there were wide variations within the two groups, with much higher concentrations of the acid within the group taking aspirin.

Medical implications

The Dumfries scientists admit diet will not provide the same anti-inflammatory protecion as aspirin.

But they say even low levels of salicylic acid may help protect against heart disease and other conditions.

They write that if the anti-inflammatory properties of salicylic acid at the concentrations found in food can be confirmed: "It is possible that dietary salicylates will prove to be one of the reasons why diets rich in fruit and vegetables protect against colorectal cancer and cardiovascular disease."

The diet combines vegetables, fruit and nuts
Eating more vegetables and soya-based products may be as effective at reducing cholesterol as medication.

Researchers in Canada have developed a vegetarian combination diet which they say cuts cholesterol by almost a third in just one month.

The diet includes vegetables, such as broccoli and red peppers; soy milk and soy sausages; oat bran cereal and bread; and fruit and nuts.
 There is hope for a drug-free treatment for some people with high cholesterol

Prof David Jenkins
The researchers believe the food programme could be a possible drug-free alternative to cutting cholesterol and protecting people from heart disease.

Coronary heart disease kills more than 110,000 people a year in England. A major cause is cholesterol circulating in the bloodstream.

Combination diet

It has been known for many years that individually soy protein, nuts and fibres like oats and barley can cut cholesterol by up to 7%.

Professor David Jenkins and colleagues at the University of Toronto decided to test whether the impact was stronger if these foods were combined.

They drew up a seven-day food plan using foods that are commonly available in supermarkets and health stores.

A typical day on the diet included:

A breakfast of soy milk, oat bran cereal with chopped fruit and almonds, oatmeal bread, vegetable-based margarine and jam;

a lunch of soy cold cuts, oat bran bread, bean soup and fruit; and

A stir-fry dinner with vegetables, tofu, fruit and almonds.

The researchers put 13 people on the combination diet for a month. They found that their cholesterol levels had dropped by 29% by the end of the period.

The researchers said the findings suggested the combination diet may be as effective as statins.

These drugs have been used extensively for 15 years to treat patients with high levels of cholesterol.

Professor Jenkins said further and larger studies are needed before the diet could be recommended to patients.

He said: "The take home message right now is that there is hope for a drug-free treatment for some people with high cholesterol.

"For us, the main feature now is to move this forward into longer-term studies."

But he added: "This opens up the possibility that diet can be used much more widely to lower blood cholesterol and possibly spare some individuals from having to take drugs."

The study is published in the journal Metabolism.

Vegetables
A healthy diet may help reduce Alzheimer's risk
Eating a diet rich in vegetables may be one way to reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, research suggests.

US scientists found that a diet high in unsaturated, unhydrogenated fats - found in vegetables and some oils - may help lower risk.

However, a separate study found antioxidant vitamins - widely touted as good for general health - offer no such protective effect against Alzheimer's.

In the first study, scientists from Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, examined 815 people aged 65 and older over a four year period.

There are studies to suggest that a diet high in unsaturated fat and low in saturated fat may raise levels of good cholesterol and lower levels of bad cholesterol in the blood

Dr Martha Clare Morris
At the start of the study none of the volunteers had Alzheimer's, but by its end 131 had developed symptoms.

The researchers found that the risk of developing the disease was highest among those who consumed the highest levels of saturated fat - found in meat and dairy products.

People who consumed a lot of saturated fat were 2.3 times more likely to develop symptoms than those whose diet was low in these fats.

Conversely, people whose diet contained high levels of unsaturated fat were up to 80% less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than those who consumed low levels of unsaturated fats.

Lead researcher Dr Martha Clare Morris told BBC NewsOnline more research was needed to confirm the findings.

But she said: "There are studies to suggest that a diet high in unsaturated fat and low in saturated fat may raise levels of good cholesterol and lower levels of bad cholesterol in the blood."

It is thought that low-density lipoprotein, or bad, cholesterol may play a role in the formation of the amyloid plaques found in the brain of Alzheimer's patients.

Dr Morris said people should consider a switch to such a diet - if only because of abundant evidence that it helped to reduce the risk of heart disease.

Vitamins

In a second study researchers at Columbia University in New York concluded that carotenes and vitamins C and E obtained from diet or through supplements are not associated with a decreased risk of Alzheimer's.

It was suspected that these antioxidant vitamins may have a protective effect because they mimimise the damage to the body's tissues caused by charged particles known as free radicals.

Some suspect that Alzheimer's is caused in part by damage to brain cells caused by free radicals.

The Columbia researchers examined 980 people, of which 242 developed Alzheimer's symptoms during the four year study.

There was no evidence that those people who consumed carotenes or vitamins A and E were any less likely to develop the disease.

Both studies were published in the journal Archives of Neurology.

BY: SUDARSHAN DAS

Dec 13, 2010 ­ SINGAPORE (SUN) ­ Anyone who eats vegetables in India should read these articles. They highlight the urgent need to follow Srila Prabhupada's advice and grow our own food.

Indian Veggies, Fruits Remain Highly Toxic
by Durgesh Nandan Jha
TIMES OF INDIA

NEW DELHI: Rampant use of banned pesticides in fruits and vegetables continues to put at risk the life of the common man. Farmers apply pesticides such as chlordane, endrin and heptachor that can cause serious neurological problems, kidney damage and skin diseases. A study conducted by Delhi-based NGO Consumer-Voice reveals that the amount of pesticides used in eatables in India is as much as 750 times the European standards. The survey collected sample data from various wholesale and retail shops in Delhi, Bangalore and Kolkata.

"Out of five internationally-banned pesticides, four were found to be common in vegetables sold in the Indian markets. Banned pesticides were found in bitter gourd and spinach,'' said Sisir Ghosh, head of Consumer-Voice. The banned chemicals included chlordane, a potent central nervous system toxin, endrin, which can cause headache nausea and dizziness, and heptachor that can damage the liver and decrease fertility.

Officials said the tests conducted on vegetables at the government-approved and NABL-accredited laboratory, Arbro Analytical Division, revealed that the Indian ladies finger contained captan, a toxic pesticide, up to 15,000 parts per billion (ppb) whereas ladies finger in the EU has captan only up to 20 ppb. "Indian cauliflower can have malathion pesticide up to 150 times higher than the European standards,'' said an official.

The vegetables studied included potato, tomato, snake gourd, pumpkin, cabbage, cucumber and bottle gourd, among others. "We have informed the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India about the excessive use of pesticides in fruits and vegetables that pose serious health hazards,'' said Ghosh. He added that strict monitoring from government agencies is required to check manufacture, import and use of banned pesticides. The pesticide residue limits have not been reviewed for the past 30 years, said Ghosh.

Earlier this month, the consumer organisation had conducted tests on fruits sold in Indian markets which again showed that 12 fruits, including bananas, apple and grapes, had high quantity of pesticides, violating both Indian and European Union standards. The chemical contents found in fruits were endosuplhan, captan, thiacloprid, parathion and DDT residues.

Article:

NEW DELHI: It is time to get careful while consuming fruits or vegetables. The lush and leafy green cabbage and the ''fresh'' apple may contain colours and chemicals that can lead to serious health problems.

Even after Delhi high court pulled up the state government on the issue, few steps have been taken to curb the use of harmful chemicals at vegetable markets. ''The chemicals can cause gastric ulcer, liver problems and kidney failure. People must be careful and wash fruits and vegetables properly before use,'' said Dr M P Sharma of Rockland Hospital.

Experts said bottle gourd is often injected with chemical like oxytocin for faster growth that can cause abnormal growth and other complications in human beings.

''Fruits and vegetables are brought to Delhi from several parts of the country. To maintain their 'freshness' and get a better deal out of them, suppliers and hawkers apply synthetic colours on vegetables and fruits which contain heavy metals like mercury and lead. Vendors and hawkers apply these colours particularly on vegetables like okra, beans and bitter gourd,'' said Sugriv Dubey. He filed a PIL in HC on the issue following which the court sought explanation from the government on Thursday.

Fruit sellers use chemicals like copper sulphate and calcium carbide to ripen bananas and mangoes. Sources added that in farms, pesticides and herbicides are used to excess to get better yield.

A few sellers admit some of them put chemicals in vegetables. ''We have no other option. We purchase fruits and vegetables at high price. If we sell the over-ripened or dried up vegetables, no one will buy them,'' said a vendor.

When contacted, Delhi health minister Kiran Walia said the prevention of food and adulteration department has collected samples of fruits and vegetables from markets and those found guilty would be punished. The minister did not comment on the alleged shortage of field officers in the department. The department recently purchased more than 20 refrigerators to preserve samples collected during raids.

Sudesh T Sachdeva, a fruit merchant at the Azadpur Mandi, claimed fruit sellers here do not use chemicals to ripen fruit. ''At mandi, we do not apply any chemicals or colours. May be the farmers or the hawkers do it,'' he said.

The news of chemicals in vegetables and fruits has left Delhiites worried. ''I soak all fruits and vegetables in lukewarm water before use. We often find a ripe fruit with bitter pulp. This is definitely because chemicals are being used,'' said Promila Badhwar, a housewife.

Article:

NEW DELHI: How fresh and healthy are the vegetables that you consume daily? Not much, according to the Union health ministry.

In a bid to make them look garden fresh and ensure that they grow faster to reach markets, farmers are using chemicals at random that threaten to cause serious health hazards to consumers.

Expressing concern, minister of state for health Dinesh Trivedi has said, "Eating vegetables -- a must for good health -- may pose serious threat to health, causing nervous breakdowns, sterility and various neurotic complications because of their chemical content."

In a letter to Union health secretary K Sujatha Rao, Trivedi has called for immediate action against farmers involved in such unscrupulous acts.

The letter outlines that the health benefits of consuming green vegetables as a staple diet finds "a sharp contradiction in the present day context". Farmers are blatantly using hormone shots to help vegetables at a faster rate. "These hormones may cause irreparable damage to our health, if consumed over a period of time," Trivedi wrote.

Oxytocin is the most commonly-used hormone, which was earlier primarily prescribed for pregnant women.

However, the Schedule H drug has been banned since then.

"The hormone can be used only on animals, leave alone vegetables. The even more shocking element is that the public/authorities may also be aware of this Oxytocin. In local parlance, it has got many names starting from cocin and 'paani to dawai', and is available at almost all the general stores," the letter said.

Oxytocin is a mammalian hormone, which also acts as a neurotransmitter in brain. The hormone is used clinically to help begin or to continue labour, to control bleeding after delivery and to stimulate the secretion of breast milk.

"Researchers have proved that the indiscriminate use of Oxytocin injections by farmers has been causing health hazards. Oxytocin is being used by fruit and vegetable growers, who administer it to the plants and climbers which grow faster and get ready for sale," warned the letter.

The injection is mainly being administered to vegetables like pumpkin, watermelon, brinjal, gourd and cucumber.

Trivedi also pointed to the rampant use of chemicals like copper sulphates for artificially colouring both fruits and vegetables. The minister hoped that the adverse effects of these toxins are scrutinised and their wanton usuage monitored and looked into immediately.

Milch cows are also administered Oxytocin to augment production of milk.

Calcium carbide is used in fruits for ripening, but can harm eyes and lungs, besides causing severe irritating and burning sensation of skin. Also, it may lead to irritation in mouth and throat, and if inhaled can cause both coughing and wheezing.

[HPI note: The New York Times ran two stories recently about how delicious Veggie Burgers have become in the last few years.]

They were the four syllables that used to have the power to make both carnivores and vegetarians cringe: veggie burger. If that has been your mental framework, it might be time to take another bite.

Across the country, chefs and restaurateurs have been taking on the erstwhile health-food punch line with a kind of experimental brio, using it as a noble excuse to fool around with flavor and texture and hue. As a result, veggie burgers haven't merely become good. They have exploded into countless variations of good, and in doing so they've begun to look like a bellwether for the American appetite. If the growing passion for plant-based diets is here to stay, chefs are paying attention.

[Food critic Jeff Gordinier wrote
this piece: ] http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/come-back-veggie-burger-all-is-forgiven/

Last week I found myself in a situation that many a cheeseburger die-hard might have scoffed at. There I was, standing in a kitchen in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, with Lukas Volger, 29, the author of "Veggie Burgers Every Which Way," a cookbook that came out last year. To open my palate to the vast spectrum of veggie options, the exceedingly gracious Mr. Volger had decided to cook me three of his favorite recipes: one with mushrooms and barley, another with tofu and chard, and a touch-of-peanut Thai-style rendition with carrots.

He showed me why it's important to fry the patties in an oiled pan, first, to get that crucial crispness, but then to finish them off in the oven so that they firm up without blackening. He talked about avoiding the mush factor; he talked about the usefulness of potato as a binding agent. Mr. Volger isn't showy about it, but the guy knows how to cook.

Mr. Volger's veggie burgers were not sad little Shake Shack replicants. They weren't trying too hard to act like beef. They owned up to their garden roots. "This isn't just an approximation of a meat burger," he told me as I bit into one. "It's an expression of a vegetable."

And there is hope in that. When my cardiologist eventually places a firm grip on my shoulder and informs me that my lifelong cheeseburger reveries must come to a close, I shall not gnash my teeth in mourning.

[Finally, try a delicious veggie burger recipe you can find at the end of this article. ]
http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/come-back-veggie-burger-all-is-forgiven/

U.S., June 11, 2011 (YouTube): In a 2008 video, Senator Barack Obama responds to a question from vegan, Nikki Benoit, during a public meeting at Gibbs High School, Saint Petersburg, Florida.

The question was "There's 10 billion land animals that we are funneling our precious water and grain through when 70 per cent of all of our grain could help feed the world's hungry. So, as the next leader of the most amazing nation in the world, how can we set the example on the more nutritional, plant-based diet that's more eco-friendly and sustainable, that can maintain our water resources and all of our grain."

Obamas response: "As countries like China and India become wealthier, they start changing their food habits; they start eating more meat, more animals. And what happens then is because it takes more grain to produce a pound of beef than if they were just eating the grain, what ends up happening is that it puts huge pressure on food supplies. Americans would actually benefit from a change in diet."

View video at source.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

UNITED STATES, June 7, 2011 (usnews): For college students who choose to limit their diet--whether vegetarian, gluten free, Kosher, or vegan--finding a wide selection of food that both meets their needs and tastes good can be difficult, given the typically meager options in dining halls that often include little more than self-serve cereal stations and salad bars.

For many, college is a time of experimentation, be it in academic interests, lifestyle changes, or diet. And with the number of college-aged vegetarians on the rise--12 percent consider themselves part of the dietary description, according to a 2009-2010 Bon Appetit Management Company survey--"students are ahead of the curve of their very campuses and food providers," says Chris Elam, program director of Meatless Mondays at the Monday Campaigns, a nonprofit public health initiative. "They have already moved to a more plant-based diet, and the campuses are following slowly."

(more at source, where you can find specific reports on colleges' food.)

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

10 JUNE 2011

Some years back, I spent an afternoon in a local abattoir, researching the book that later became Killing: Misadventures in Violence.

I was there a few hours, at most: a dilettantish trip to the kind of facility where thousands upon thousands of people spend their working lives.

But that, really, was the point. Meat and its by-products are central to Australian society and each and every year we kill some eight million cows, five million pigs and nearly half a billion chickens, but those of us not directly involved in the industry know almost nothing about exactly how our food arrives on our plate.

When I told friends about my plans, most of them shuddered. They were not vegetarians. Neither I am. They knew – obviously, they knew – that meat necessitated killing. They just didn't want to think too much about what that meant.

And I didn't either.

Let me say upfront that the abattoir in question was nothing like the Indonesian slaughterhouse. The opposite, really: clean and modern and well-maintained.

The manager, whom I'll call 'Kevin', showed me every consideration, asking me gently whether I was squeamish (sometimes, he said, visiting vet students would faint), and guiding me through the elaborate hygiene procedures: the mandatory uniform, rubber boots and hairnet; the hand and feet-washing that took place at every door.

We went, first of all, to the control room, a familiar office setting of computers and desks and white-collar staff, albeit with a view from its windows of white clad figures on a floor below, performing unidentifiable violences on carcasses twisting on hooks.

We chatted there for a while - the workers entirely at ease; me, fighting a rising nausea - and then Kevin said, 'OK, let's go to the kill floor.'

Inside an abattoir proper, the first thing you notice – the only thing, really, for a while – is blood. Blood everywhere, flowing in a stream along the floor, smeared on the coats of the workers positioned at each station, dropping from the dead cattle hanging from the ceiling above us as we walked along the line.

And then, as well as blood, noise. An abattoir is, at base, a factory, with all the clattering, hissing and screeching that industrial production entails. Historically, slaughterhouses actually pioneered assembly-line labour: Henry Ford copied his famous processes from the techniques of the Chicago meatworks. But where Fordism concerned itself with assembly, the workers in an abattoir disassemble, and so the further down the floor we moved, the more complete the carcasses became: a journey in which the bodies developed more and more features – skins, heads, entrails – until, eventually, we came to the corner from which the line emerged, disgorging complete and obviously newly dead animals.

'We'll start down to the kill floor,' shouted Kevin above the racket. 'This way.'

I steeled myself, as best I could – for we could hear the animals now, their shrieks blending with the grinding of the machines – and followed him through another door to where the slaughter actually took place.

What happened was this.

A cow, which, in that context, seemed not the cutesy pet of Old McDonald's Farm but an enormous and dangerously heavy beast, came up a covered ramp and into an enclosed space where a machine pressed down upon it and gripped its head tight. A worker reached over and gently touched its skull with a tool something like an electric drill. A sound of a staple gun firing, and the animal fell, as if its life had been turned off with a switch. Another man ran the edge of a knife along its throat, opening up a huge gushing wound, before the carcass tumbled down rollers onto a platform near the floor, legs splaying and spasming.

At the time, I thought the gun killed each animal, since, when it was pulled back from their skulls, they fell, entirely still. But actually the tool was intended simply to stun, and death came only when the knife split the throat: a two-part process that, some writers suggested, served an important psychological function, since the first man could think of himself only as anaesthetising a live animal, while the second person cut a beast already inert and lifeless. The moral responsibility lay with neither: one stunned and the other bled, but neither actually killed.

The slaughter was halal – the men muttering a prayer each time they wielded the knife – but the process was clinical, scientific, efficient (again, nothing like those images from Indonesia) with the systems so carefully planned and calibrated to allow very little divergence from the approved method. The cows came up the ramp and within minutes they were dead. The slaughter was quick and efficient and by-the-numbers.

'What is truly startling in this mass transition from life to death is the complete neutrality of the act,' wrote one visitor to an abattoir in the forties. 'One does not experience, one does not feel; one merely observes.'

And that's how it was for me.

'Death yawns at me as I walk up and down in this abode of skulls', wrote the American philosopher Bronson Alcott after one visit to a butcher. 'Murder and blood are written on its stalls … I tread amidst carcasses. I am in the presence of the slain.'

I experienced that, too, but more, when I first came to the line, and looked on the protruding tongues of the dangling carcasses and felt an almost piercing realisation that I was looking at living beings that had just been made dead.

But the kill floor was so overwhelming as to drain any sensation. The workers slit throats, the cattle fell, and the line rattled and moved forward, with man and machine locked together into a natural process, an inevitable and almost collaborative motion.

We stood for a while, watching the killing, and then we moved on. I had seen the worst of it, and, during the rest of my visit, blood-soaked men cutting at carcasses seemed entirely unexceptional.

All of that came back to mind in the context of the justified outrage after the Four Cornersepisode exposed what live cattle exports entailed.

The footage from Indonesia distressed so many people, it seems to me, not merely because of its cruelty but because it showed the individual responses of individual animals, and thus fostered a natural empathy.

The eight million cows slaughtered each year are statistics; the specific animal shaking with fear as it's clubbed to death on your screen reminds you of the pets you've known and loved, creatures that undeniably show emotion, experience happiness and, most of all, feel pain, endure suffering.

One interesting Scottish study shows that the way livestock producers think about their animals varies according to where they are situated in the production process. Those who raise sheep can regard them as animals; those closest to the abattoir make deliberate efforts to see the beasts simply as money, with one dealer explaining that he only ever looked at the sheep's torsos, since 'some have got attractive faces and look as though they are smiling' – and the implications of that were unthinkable.

Which is simply to say that the great facilitator of killing is abstraction.

That's true in war, where soldiers train to think of their enemies not as people but as amorphous and interchangeable targets. It's true in the administration of capital punishment, a process which, as a Virginia executioner explained to me, prison staff break down the mechanics of putting a man to death into their basic components, so that each execution takes place with factory floor precision. And it's true in the production of the meat that most of us consume.

On the way home from the abattoir, I counted all the huge cattle trucks bringing animals to slaughter, down a highway not far from my work, and I wondered why I'd never noticed them before. The answer, of course, was obvious. I didn't see because I didn't want to see, didn't want to think about what was about to happen to the animals in the vehicle in front of me.

Once more, I'm not a vegetarian. The arguments about animal rights are, I think, complex, and deserve more consideration then they generally receive. But I think that you can make a legitimate case for meat eating – or, at very least, for a politics that privileges the suffering of people over the suffering of animals.

That being said, there's something particularly morally distasteful about evading realities on the basis that they make us feel uncomfortable about ourselves. In Australia, we kill animals in huge quantities. All of us should, it seems to me, be prepared to face up to what that actually means.

Jeff Sparrow is the author of Killing: Misadventures in Violence, and the editor of the Overlandliterary journal

NEW YORK, June 3, 2011 (The New York Times): Once, we humans had to combine hunting skills and luck to eat meat, which could supply then-rare nutrients in large quantities. This progressed -- or at least moved on -- to a stage where a family could raise an annual pig and maybe keep a cow and some chickens. Quite suddenly (this development is no more than 50 years old, even in America), we can eat animals at will.

Those who were born in mid-to-late 20th century America take this for granted; this is the new normal. But the phenomenon is global: there's more than twice as much meat available per person than there was in 1950. Citizens of most developed nations have gone down the same path, and as the poor become less so, they buy more meat, too.

Animals today are produced badly, cause immeasurable damage to both our bodies and the earth, and -- highly processed-- they don't taste that good.

In much of the world, the local fish is mostly gone. A restaurant in Istanbul that had blown my mind 10 years ago with its local variety of fish was offering a few fish that the waiter kindly un-pushed: "These are from the fish farm," he said, "so why bother?" Indeed. His advice -- "why bother?" -- holds true for at least 90 percent of the animal products we're offered, even if we are not vegetarians.

[HPI note: Though meat consumption in India is growing, this growth is from a very small base. Fast-food outlets may be opening, but Indians are not consuming on a western level. If India and China were both consuming at western levels, that would have serious impacts on global food supply. According to 2007 FAO data, Indians consume around 3.3kg of meat per capita, per year. An American consumes that amount in about 10 days (122.8kg per capita); an average Chinese citizen would take about a month (53.5 kg per capita). See the source http://www.firstpost.com/blogs/bird-of-gold-19850.html

http://www.naturalnews.com/032099_poultry_superbugs.html#ixzz1Jv6vRt6q

(NaturalNews) How would you like a big, juicy burger loaded with onions, mustard, ketchup -- and a big helping of drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), a bacteria linked to a wide range of human diseases?

If you find that dish stomach-churning instead of appetizing, then maybe you should think twice before eating not only meat but chicken and turkey, too, at least in the U.S.

According to a nationwide study just released by the Flagstaff, Arizona-based Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen),meatand poultry from U.S.grocery storeshave an unexpectedly high rate of dangerous disease-causing bacteria, includingantibioticresistant superbugs. In fact, almost half (47 percent) of all meat andpoultrysamples tests were contaminated with S. aureus.

What's more, 52 percent of these contaminated meats containedsuperbugs, meaning the bacteria were resistant to multiple classes ofantibiotics.That adds up to multi-antibiotic resistant Staphgermsbeing present in about one out of every 4 samples of meat,chickenor turkey.

"For the first time, we know how much of our meat and poultry is contaminated with antibiotic-resistant Staph, and it is substantial," Lance B. Price, Ph.D., senior author of the study and Director of TGen's Center for Food Microbiology and Environmental Health, said in a statement to the media.

Theresearch, published today in the journalClinical Infectious Diseases, is the first national investigation of antibiotic resistant S. aureus in the U.S. food supply. Thescientistscollected and analyzed 136 samples of beef, chicken, pork andturkeysold under 80 brands in 26 retail grocerystoresin Los Angeles, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Flagstaff and Washington, D.C.

So where does this downright nauseatingcontaminationcome from? The TGen researchers reported that DNA testing shows the food theanimalsthemselves were fed is likely the major source of contamination.

"The fact thatdrug-resistantS. aureus was so prevalent, and likely came from thefoodanimals themselves, is troubling, and demands attention to how antibiotics are used in food-animal production today," Dr. Price added.

The dirty truth many Americans -- especially meat eaters -- don't want to face is that conditions on so-called industrialfarmsare not only often inhumane but downright sickening. Animals raised for slaughter are packed together densely and steadily fed low doses of antibiotics in their food. The new report concludes these industrial farms are the ideal breeding grounds fordrug-resistant bacteriathat can move from animals to the human population.

"The emergence of antibiotic-resistantbacteria-- including Staph -- remains a major challenge in clinical medicine," Paul S. Keim, Ph.D., Director of TGen's Pathogen Genomics Division and Director of the Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics at NorthernArizonaUniversity (NAU), emphasized in a media statement.

"This study shows that much of our meat and poultry is contaminated with multidrug-resistant Staph. Now we need to determine what this means in terms ofriskto the consumer," Dr. Keim, a co-author of thepaper, added.

But doesn't the U.S. government routinely survey retail meat and poultry for drug-resistant bacteria? The study points out the feds only check for four types of superbugs -- but S. aureus is not among them. The paper urges a more comprehensive inspection program and points out S. aureus can cause devastatinghealthproblems.

While it's true Staph germs can usually be killed with proper cooking, the scientists pointed out Staph still poses a substantial health risk through improper food handling and cross-contamination in the kitchen. Infections with S. aureus can cause a range of illnesses from minor skininfectionsto life-threatening diseases, such as pneumonia, endocarditis (inflammation of the heart) and sepsis (infection in the bloodstream).

And should you get one of these antibiotic-resistant strains from meat or poultry, treatment can be difficult.

"Antibiotics are the most important drugs that we have to treat Staph infections; but when Staph are resistant to three, four, five or even nine different antibiotics --like we saw in this study -- that leaves physicians few options,"Dr. Price stated.

For more information:
http://www.tgen.org/

Learn more:http://www.naturalnews.com/032099_poultry_superbugs.html#ixzz1Jv76UwIX

INDIA, June 17, 2011: A new study has suggested that sticking to a vegetarian diet can help kidney disease patients avoid accumulating toxic levels of phosphorous in their bodies. Kidney disease patients must limit their phosphorous intake, as high levels of the mineral can lead to heart disease and death.

Sharon Moe (Indiana University School of Medicine and Roudebush Veterans' Affairs Medical Center) and her colleagues studied the effects of vegetarian and meat-based diets on phosphorous levels in nine patients. Despite equivalent protein and phosphorus concentrations in the two diets, patients had lower blood phosphorus levels when they were on the vegetarian diet compared with the meat-based diet.

The animals, considered holy by the Hare Krishna faith, are massaged during milking and scented candles and soothing music add to the calming atmosphere
Thursday 16th June 2011

By Paul Lee and Chris Hewett
http://www.watfordobserver.co.uk on 17 Jun 2011

Production of the most expensive pint of milk in the UK will be expanded after Hare Krishna farmers in Aldenham agreed a deal with a Kent dairy.

Ahimsa milk, costing £2.40 per litre, or £1.70 a pint, is currently produced at Bhaktivedanta Manor, in Hilfield Lane, Aldenham, but officials at the temple have penned a deal to increase production.

The Lotus Trust, which manages sales of the produce through its Ahimsa Milk Foundation, has agreed a deal with Commonwork Organic Dairy, in Kent, to produce more of the luxury white stuff.

Customers in Watford will be able to order the dear dairy straight to their door, via a subscription, when production begins in July.

The extraordinary produce costs more than double the price of organic milk due to the special treatment the pampered cows receive before and during milking.

The animals, considered holy by the Hare Krishna faith, are massaged during the process and scented candles and soothing music add to the calming atmosphere.

No animals are ever slaughtered, and elderly cows are given retirement to a sanctuary at approximately 13 years old, safe in the knowledge a pension scheme, derived from milk sales, will support them into their later years.

Approximately 65p from every litre sold goes towards the animal's retirement fund, which covers hospice and vet costs.

Sita Rama das, director of the Lotus Trust, said: "It has been a lot of effort to get here and we're happy to provide this service to the public. We are very excited about how this project will develop in the future.

"The Lotus Trust has been campaigning for better treatment of cows, and all money gained from this venture will be invested to promote care and better welfare for the animals."

For more information visit http://www.ahimsamilk.org

BATTLE CREEK, MICHIGAN, June 2, 2011: Bonnie Farmer, M.S., R.D. for PlantWise Nutrition Consulting in Plainwell, MI has gained national recognition of her research completed at the School of Health Sciences of Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti.

About to be published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Dietetic Association, her article, "A Vegetarian Dietary Pattern as a Nutrient-Dense Approach to Weight Management," will help overcome the misperception that vegetarian diets for weight management are deficient in certain nutrients.

Farmers study included a survey of 13,292 adults aged 19 and older. The dietary quality of vegetarians, nonvegetarians and dieters were compared. Vegetarians had higher mean intakes of fiber, vitamins A, C, and E, thiamin, riboflavin, folate, calcium, magnesium and iron than for all nonvegetarians.

This study suggests that vegetarian diets are nutrient dense and consistent with the Dietary Guidelines. They could be safely recommended for weight management without concern for deficiencies, noted co-author Dr. Brian Larson.

India's population to overtake China's by 2025

Posted: 16 June 2011

India will overtake China in terms of population by 2025, an analysis of the provisional Census, 2011 data suggests. India's population of over 1.2 billion is then expected to have grown to  more than 1.4 billion.

Reporting this, The Hindu newspaper says that with more than 1.2 billion people, India contains about 17.5 per cent of the world's people - meaning that every sixth person on earth is an Indian. China is the only country with a larger population, with 144 million more people.

The United Nations estimates that India's population grew at an annual rate of 1.43 per cent during 2005-10. In comparison, China registered a much lower annual growth rate of 0.7 per cent during corresponding period - almost on a par with the developed nation average.

Analysing the provisional Census, 2011 data, the Management Institute of Population and Development has quoted the Population Reference Bureau's 2010 estimates, which says that India has 1189 million people whereas China's has 1,338 million. Nearly 27 million children are born every year in India and only 16 million in China.

In the last 20 years, India's population has increased by more than 350 million, while China's has increased only by 210 million. With China successfully managing the population issue, it has been able to improve the rate of economic growth. “One fails to understand why some experts and policy makers have stated that India's population is its strength,” the analysts point out.

Source: The Hindu, April 17, 2011.

http://news.iskcon.org/node/3198/2010-10-21/reversing_the_secularization_of_eating#ixzz15DZllK4g

At the end of a journeyman's summer, I lay in an unfamiliar wood, watching the stars assert themselves upon a deepening night. My wanderlust faded into a gentle homesickness, and I dreamt of cookies, warm chocolate chip cookies and coffee, the deepest of comforts from my Christmases and homecomings. I flipped through the remembered textures and smells of soft dough and chocolate, and I was struck by the centrality of food to my story. Eating has marked my celebrations and my tragedies. Its rituals surround and define the points of reference by which I know my life, and from which I collect hints of life's meaning.
I imagine that such an association with eating is, or has been, the norm for most of us. Across cultures and traditions, the cycles of gathering, preparing, and consuming food have been occasions of ritual and storytelling. They have led to a series of practices and beliefs that ground people in their social, environmental, and existential contexts. But these connections are fading as our eating loses its grasp upon what sacred moments we have left.

Our ancestors indwelled a world flush with the sacrosanct. Hunters connected with their prey as a part of a single chain. They spoke to the spirit of the slain animal and respected its sacrifice. Farmers tended an order that both depended upon and sustained them. They danced and sang for the rain and acknowledged their place in the cycles of nature. Cooking was sanctified as communities grew and defined themselves in terms of their diets. Laws and rituals were developed to bind people together through food. And the final act of eating was sanctified as sustenance was passed between the work-rough hands that contributed to its production. Prayers were spoken and bread was broken as friends and families fed their living with a sense of gratitude.

As these relationships and connections began to be displaced by considerations of utility and efficiency, the sacred was squeezed out of our food system from the outside in. Scanning cartoon-faced packages and dropping cold-cuts into a basket is rarely occasioned with reflection upon one's place in the universe. The commodification of our eating eliminated the empathy between consumers and consumed. Chemically nurtured and internationally distributed monocropping robbed farmers of their connection with the rhythms of the soil and their relationship with their customers. Mass-produced and nutritionally bankrupt diets broke the social ties of traditional cuisine. And the subjugation of meal-time to our commutes and our sitcoms eliminated the occasion for reflection upon and gratitude for the simple good of enjoying our food.

Our eating has been secularized. It has been robbed of its poetry and beaten into the staccato uniformity of packaged snacks. We have insisted upon efficiency as the only criterion of our culinary aesthetic. As a direct result, our prey suffer needlessly, our planet is wilting under the pressures of our demands, our neighbors are strangers, we are unhealthy, and our place in the order of things is lost behind the incessant pace of our living.

We are in desperate need of reconnecting our eating with the sacred. This needn't mean a return to the perspectives and practices of the past. It does necessarily mean a reevaluation of the fundamental principles by which we relate to our eating. It means including considerations of beauty and meaning in the design of our food systems.

Conveniently, our religious traditions are equipped with tools and traditions for just such a reconsideration. Ramadan, Yom Kippur, the Sabbath, and the Eucharist -- all opportunities for exploring and restoring connections between the sacred and our eating.

But to take advantage of this shared concern for sacred eating, we must be willing to crack open the shells that have formed around our rituals and allow them to inform our everyday living. They must be set loose on our reality so that our memories of warm cookies and coffee continue to bind together not only our own narratives, but our communities, our planet, and the thousand little relationships out of which the sacred emerges.

Kent Hayden, M.Div., is a recent graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary. His exploits include used book hunting, organic vegetable farming, and thought gathering. He is based in New Jersey but is currently living and writing in Royal City, WA.
 

Read more: http://news.iskcon.org/node/3198/2010-10-21/reversing_the_secularization_of_eating#ixzz15DZa99WT

IANS Jun 29, 2011, 12.00am IST

As India grapples with a major public health problem, being home to an estimated 50.8 million diabetic population, the largest in the world, experts say "consuming a few almonds daily can help combat the lifestyle disease."

"Eating almonds has a positive effect on reducing low density cholesterol and also improves insulin sensitivity; so it does help in pushing diabetes away," says Ritesh Gupta, head of clinical operation at Fortis C-Doc Hospital.

"It is a healthy source of fibre, protein and calories and has been found to have a positive effect in reducing bad cholesterol and improved insulin sensitivity," Gupta told.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

http://news.iskcon.com/node/3733/2011-06-30/new_website_to_help_visitors_of_mayapur#ixzz1QqB3HZwT

By Gopijana Vallabha Das for ISKCON News on 30 Jun 2011

ISKCON Mayapur has launched the new Mayapur Tourism website http://www.VisitMayapur.com .

The new website is geared toward all people whether they are practicing devotees or not. The site will be able to provide general information regarding Mayapur's places to visit, festival information and calendar, tour packages, accommodations, and transportation options. There is online booking available for tour packages, cars, and accommodations. There are still more pages that will are being added to the site.

http://news.iskcon.com/node/3733/2011-06-30/new_website_to_help_visitors_of_mayapur#ixzz1QqBH77cp

Amongst the things the animal flesh industry would prefer you didn’t know about are viral infections contracted by workers in the meat industry. Fresh meat is so laden with viruses that there is a well-defined medical condition colloquially known as “butcher’s warts,” affecting the hands of those who handle the flesh of dead cows, poultry and fish. Not only do the people who handle the flesh of dead creatures contract a virus that causes warts, but so also do those who work with them, and their families.

According to a paper called Treatment of Warts by Steven and Joshua Pray, although warts can affect anyone, people who work with raw meat are at “particularly high risk of butcher's warts.”

The International Journal of Epidemiology published an article called: The Aetiology and Risk Factors for Warts among Poultry Processing Workers. Researchers conducted an investigation at a poultry processing plant in New Zealand to study the prevalence of warts among workers and the risk of developing warts. The study found that “Almost half had developed wart-like lesions on their arms or hands after they began working at the plant.” People working in areas where they often handled dead, raw, unfrozen chickens were three times more likely to have developed warts.

Another report published by the Journal of Clinical Microbiology reveals that even the wives of butchers seem to be “at higher risk of cervical cancer,” which is associated with exposure to the wart virus. The report also says “concerns about viral infection have led to recommendations that pregnant women and people with AIDS not work on the slaughter lines.”

The report “Mortality in the Baltimore Union Poultry Cohort: Non-Malignant Diseases,” paints a darker picture by concluding that “Poultry workers may have excess occurrence of disease affecting several organs and systems, probably originating from widespread infection with a variety of micro-organisms.” The report also concludes, “Poultry workers as a group had an overall excess of deaths” from a variety of diseases.

An update to the union poultry cohort report says, “Compared to the US general population, an excess of cancers of the buccal and nasal cavities and pharynx, esophagus, recto-sigmoid/rectum/anus, liver and intrabiliary system, myelofibrosis, lymphoid leukemia and multiple myeloma was observed in particular subgroups or in the entire poultry cohort.”

There is already a great deal of clinical evidence that eating the flesh of dead creatures causes disease amongst humans. Now we know that even touching the flesh of dead creatures may not only cause warts, but increased mortality. The weight of evidence for vegetarianism continues to grow.

In his purport to Srimad Bhagavatam Canto 4, chapter 25, verse 8, Srila Prabhupada tells us “When animals are killed in a slaughterhouse, six people connected with the killing are responsible for the murder. The person who gives permission for the killing, the person who kills, the person who helps, the person who purchases the meat, the person who cooks the flesh and the person who eats it, all become entangled in the killing.” Scientists and researchers are continuing to provide the evidence to support the karmic consequences of the desire to kill and eat other creatures. Tell your friends.

By Mark Hyman, MD for The Huffington Post on 14 Aug 2010

I was in a grocery store yesterday. While I was squeezing avocados to pick just the right ones for my family's dinner salad, I overheard a conversation from a couple that had also picked up an avocado.

"Oh, these avocados look good, let's get some."

Then looking up at the price, they said, "Two for five dollars!" Dejected, they put the live avocado back and walked away from the vegetable aisle toward the aisles full of dead, boxed, canned, packaged goods where they can buy thousands of calories of poor-quality, nutrient-poor, factory-made, processed foods filled with sugar, fat, and salt for the same five dollars. This is the scenario millions of Americans struggling to feed their families face every day.

The odd paradox is that food insecurity--not knowing where the next meal is coming from or not having enough money to adequately feed your family--leads to obesity, diabetes and chronic disease. Examining this paradox may help us advocate for policies that make producing fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole other foods cheaper, while rethinking the almost $300 billion in government subsides that support the production of cheap, processed food derived from corn and soy.

At the same time, a Food Revolution, along the lines of that advocated by Jamie Oliver, a radical chef, can help Americans take back their table and their health from a food industry that has driven us to eat more than 50 percent of our meals out of the home compared to less than 2 percent 100 years ago. And most of those meals eaten at home are produced in plants, not grown on plants, are from a food chemist's lab, not a farmer's field. Cooking and eating whole fresh foods at home, can be cheaper, more fun, and simpler than most people think.
 

Read more: http://news.iskcon.org/node/3113/2010-09-11/why_quick_cheap_food_is_actually_more_expensive#ixzz15DRalyoM

From the editorial board of the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/03/opinion/03fri3.html?_r=1 )

The point of factory farming is cheap meat, made possible by confining large numbers of animals in small spaces. Perhaps the greatest hidden cost is its potential effect on human health.

Small doses of antibiotics ­ too small to kill bacteria ­ are fed to factory farm animals as part of their regular diet to promote growth and offset the risks of overcrowding. What factory farms are really raising is antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which means that several classes of antibiotics no longer work the way they should in humans. We pay for cheap meat by sacrificing some of the most important drugs ever developed.

Last week, the Natural Resources Defense Council, joined by other advocacy groups, sued the Food and Drug Administration to compel it to end the nontherapeutic use of penicillin and tetracycline in farm animals. Veterinarians would still be able to treat sick animals with these drugs but could not routinely add the drugs to their diets.

For years, the F.D.A. has had the scientific studies and the authority to ban these drugs. But it has always bowed to pressure from the pharmaceutical and farm lobbies, despite the well-founded objections of groups like the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization, which support an antibiotic ban.

It is time for the F.D.A. to stop corporate factory farms from squandering valuable drugs just to promote growth among animals confined in conditions that inherently create the risk of disease. According to recent estimates, 70 percent of the antibiotics sold in this country end up in farm animals. The F.D.A. can change that by honoring its own scientific conclusions and its statutory obligation to end its approval of unsafe drug uses.

A version of this editorial appeared in print on June 3, 2011, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: The High Cost of Cheap Meat.

See similar articles at Vegetarianism & Beyond:
http://turn.to/Vegetarianism

A simple village man once wanted to serve the greatest person.  He approached the mayor of his town and asked to be given some work.  While serving the mayor, the village man noticed the mayor giving tax money to a visitor.  He asked who the visitor was, and the mayor told him that he was a representative of the governor.  "Is the governor greater than you?"  "Oh yes, he is greater than me," the mayor said.  "Then I want to serve him," said the village man.  The appreciated the man's honesty and recommended him to the mayor.  The village man served the governor for some time.  Then one day a visitor arrived accompanied by some horsemen.  The governor welcomed the visitor graciously and treated him with all respect.  When he had a chance, the village man asked the governor who the visitor was.  "He is the king's viceroy," said the governor.  "And who is the king?" the man asked.  "He is the ruler of the whole land," said the governor.  "He is very great."  "Is he greater than you?" the man asked.  "Oh yes, I am just his servant."  "Then I would like to serve him."  The village man was talented and so, to please the king, the governor sent the village man to him.  The man served the king for some months, and then one day the king told him to ready the chariot.  A great sage had arrived in the kingdom and the king wanted the sage's advice on how to rule.  The village man watched as the king approached the saintly person and offered respect.  The king then sat and listened to the sage discourse for some time.  Then, as the king was preparing to return to his palace, the village man approached the sage and asked if he were the greatest person.  The sage said, no, he was only a menial servant.  "So please tell me, who is the greatest person?"  "To find the greatest person, you must go to the temple of Narayana," the sage told him.  Without a moments delay, the man set off walking.  It was evening when he arrived, and the temple doors were closed.  The man knocked on the door for a long time.  Finally a temple priest came and told him to go home and return the next day.  Not having any place to go, the man lay down by the gate and went to sleep.  Before sunrise, some brahmanas from a nearby village passed the temple and saw the man sleeping.  They noticed that covering the man's body was one of the Deity's chadars.  "He is a thief!" they said.  In anger they woke the man and asked them where he got the chadar.  The man was mystified and told them he did not know where the chadar had come from.  The brahmanas then tried to open the temple door and discovered it was locked.  They then realized that Lord Narayana Himself had placed the chadar over his servant to keep him warm while he slept.  The brahmanas asked the man where he came from, and he told them his story.  The man was then accepted into the temple and trained to serve the Deity.  In this way the man came to serve the greatest person.

MORAL:  We should understand what we are doing in this Krsna consciousness movement, and that this is the culmination of all work and endeavour, devotional service to Lord Krsna.

See similar inspirational snippets HERE:
http://www.hknet.org.nz/parables.htm

The phaomnneil pweor of the hmuan mnid: Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig!
Mybae the I can sotp slpel ckchenig?

Topical Articles:
Abortion - http://www.hknet.org.nz/index-abortion.htm
Genetic Engineering ( GE or GM ) - http://www.hknet.org.nz/GE.html
Environment - http://www.hknet.org.nz/Environment.htm
Encroachment - http://www.hknet.org.nz/WE-Day2004.html
Cloning - http://www.hknet.org.nz/cloning.htm
Science - http://www.hknet.org.nz/science2KC.html
Cow Protection - http://www.hknet.org.nz/Cow-protection.htm
The Four Regulative Principles of Freedom - http://www.hknet.org.nz/Regs-4page.htm
seX-files - http://www.hknet.org.nz/seX-files.htm
Mundane Knowledge - http://www.hknet.org.nz/mundaneknowledge.html
Death (Yamaduttas - Terminal Restlessness etc)- http://www.hknet.org.nz/death.html
Near Death Experience - http://www.hknet.org.nz/NDE.htm
Ghosts - http://www.hknet.org.nz/ghosts.htm
Reincarnation again here - http://www.hknet.org.nz/Reincarnation-page.htm
Gain some insights in the TV culture  - http://www.hknet.org.nz/television.html
The aweful Truth about softdrinks - http://www.hknet.org.nz/theREALthing.html
Changing the face of the Earth - http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/1390/index.html
UFOs - http://www.hknet.org.nz/UFOs.html
Vegetarianism & Beyond - http://turn.to/Vegetarianism
Vegetarianism in the major Religions - All manner of religions
Articles for newcomers to Krishna consciousness - http://www.krishna.com/newsite/main.php?id=87
Self Help and Motivational pages - Deals and Affiliate programs: - http://www.hknet.org.nz/index-selfhelp.html
Myth of the Aryan invasion by Dr. David Frawley: - http://www.hknet.org.nz/Aryan-invasion-mythDF.html

The Peace Formula - (By HDG Srila A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada) http://www.hknet.org.nz/PeaceFormula.html

.........many other articles - http://www.hknet.org.nz/index-articles.htm

and from there go to the Main Index http://www.hknet.org.nz/index.htm

Iskcon News Articles now available - many topical insights
http://www.iskcon.com/new/index.html

Paradigms - where things are not all they seem

 The Peace Formula
http://www.hknet.org.nz/PeaceFormula.html

The Real Peace Formula
http://www.hknet.org.nz/PeaceRealF.html

See more on Yoga and Meditation HERE:
http://www.hknet.org.nz/index-yoga.html

World Vegetarian Day October 1st yearly &
World Vegetarian Awareness Month of October yearly
...please visit our links and see what you can do to help

World Smoke Free Day
31st May Every Year 

http://www.be-free.org/b-media/market-bfree03/cinema.php

yeah kick the butt
...and remember from 10th December 2004 no more smoking in public places in New Zealand by law