It’s taken a century of lobbying – both formal and informal, organizational and personal – to arrive in the America of 2010 where Bobby Jindal sits in the Governor’s Mansion in Louisiana, Nikki Haley is poised to become the next governor of South Carolina, and where scores of Indian-Americans are serving in the Obama White House and many more are standing for political office.

This festive season, welcome to Nina Paley’s animated film ‘Sita Sings the Blues’, yet another retelling of India’s great epic, Ramayana. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it, as some have done, ‘Sitayana’ for it tells the tale from the perspective of Sita, not unlike the oral retellings through the ages by village women that made Sita the focus of the story. Only here the story is told through the jazz tradition of torch songs, of a lovely, smoky voiced lament more often heard in a dark New York lounge or bar, than in the rural outposts of India.

Do Hindus eat monkey brains? You would think so if you saw the film ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’. Of the western viewers who might have taken this with a pinch of salt as Hollywood excess, many still have the most vexing perceptions about Hinduism from the horrors of caste to the burning of widows. Yes, and don’t forget rat worship, arranged child marriages, female infanticide, dowry and the killing of young brides.So who will set the record straight in the West?
Enter the Interpreters of Dharma, the Myth-Busters.

It was a bit like a floating library of Vedantic literature – and now it’s shutting down, or is being grounded, if you want to take the airport analogy a bit further. For the last four decades, the Hare Krishnas, as the followers of International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) are popularly known, were a fixture in American airports. Heads shaved, clad in orange and white robes, they would cluster in busy terminals, waving Vedic literature at rushing passengers. Now their spiritual take-off has been canceled – a California Supreme Court ruling prohibits the Hare Krishnas from soliciting passengers at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX).

In this festive season, as Diwali approaches, are you the perfect host?

Well, here’s a story that will make you re-evaluate your hospitality skills, for the host in this tale is none other than Lord Krishna. When his boyhood friend, Sudama – hungry, impoverished and in rags – arrived at the palace, the guards almost did not allow him in. But Lord Krishna, overjoyed to see his old friend, received him with open arms and joyfully led him to his throne. He personally washed his feet and fed him with his own hands.

Whether it’s the California text books decision or the passage of the Congressional Diwali Resolution, these are not free gifts which have been dropped into the palms of Indian-Americans but rather hard-won victories by advocates, including a band of young second-generation Indian Americans of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF).

When the writer Gita Mehta was growing up in Orissa, a small ancient image of Ganesha was unearthed in a mound of dirt as the foundations of their family home were being laid. “I’ve always kept the Ganesha which came out of my parents’ home,” confided Mehta when I interviewed her once in New York. “That is the one image that goes with me wherever I go. He came out of the Indian soil so to me he’s like an umbilical cord that connects me to India. So it doesn’t matter where I live – he is my India.”

Lord Ganesha enters people’s lives in mysterious ways – sometimes it can even be just a chance encounter on a busy New York street! When photographer Shana Dressler passed a bookstore in Manhattan, she stopped in her tracks. In the window was a photography book which had on its cover a striking 20-foot high plaster of Paris statue of the elephant-headed God in the water, being splashed by a small army of men.

His eyes are smiling as he hands the little girl a chocolate bar and sees her eyes light up; his photographic memory can recall the first names and faces of hundreds of devotees he hasn’t seen for many years; he delivers soaring ex tempo speeches which younger intellectuals would stumble on. He can quote from [...]

What better way to start a new blog than with Ganesha, the Lord of New Beginnings? Give him whichever name you choose – He is that consciousness that is within us and around us and in the very breath we take.