By Vidya Pradhan

The big news in the Fremont Unified School District is the introduction of Hindi as an accredited course in the high schools.

The person responsible for this, Madhu Aggarwal,has been conducting Hindi classes at various locations in the Bay Area under the auspices of the Madhu Bhasha Kendra.

Madhu started as a volunteer at the Hindi classes at the Fremont temple nearly 20 years ago. After a while, the lack of structure in the system forced her to develop her own teaching methodology. She started offering classes in her garage and never looked back. More »

By Gaurav Rastogi

I’ve been reading the Bhagavad Gita for a couple of weeks now, and I’m feeling one with Arjuna already. When Chapter 1 ended, Arjuna was overwhelmed and panicked. Ditto for me.

SO MANY VERSIONS, SO LITTLE TIME
OK, so I cheated. I had promised that I would only read one version of the Bhagavad Gita and record my notes. Now, I’m adding internet searches on Amazon and Wiki, to my set of sources.

After I posted last, I received many comments and recommendations for Gita translations. The ones most recommended seem to be Eknath Eshwaran’s version, as well as Osho’s version. I’m panicked that people might compare! More »

By Rohini Mohan

‘Gandhi, My Father’ directed by Feroz Khan (not the actor) and produced by Anil Kapoor is based on the play Mahatma vs. Gandhi – 1998 also directed by Feroz Khan. It explores the rather stormy relationship Gandhiji had with his oldest son, Harilal. Naseeruddin Shah and K.K Menon played the Mahatma and his son respectively in the play, while Darshan Zariwala and Akshaye Khanna play the senior and junior Gandhi in the film. More »

by Divya Valluri

Divya Valluri is the quintessential California girl; confident, talented, vivacious and earthy. Her parents have given her a couple of very useful gifts; Indian roots and American wings. WNI’s August 5th parenting article “The confused Indian American Parent” in which PR Ganapathy talks about praise in the American system and Sukanya Mahadevan explores the efficacy of a crazy extra curricular schedule for kids, evoked this response from Divya;

I think it’s interesting that parental concerns about the dichotomy of Indian and American cultures never really address the effort children growing up in the United States inevitably have to make to create a balance between the two. We definitely go through a struggle to combine the Asian values of our households with the American values in the outside world, and still have solid relationships in both places. I respect the valid concerns Indian parents have with raising their children with a combination of solid values and limitless opportunities. I don’t think my parents are going to be reading this any time soon, so I can safely say that I sincerely believe they raised me with a perfect combination of the two. So here we go: More »

by Rohini Mohan

Sony Entertainment Television (SET) was launched on Comcast in Central and Northern California on August 8th. Comcast is very enthusiastic about the launch, which was a result of popular demand; apparently there have been a large number of subscribers for the new channel already, in the couple of weeks that the new channel has been available to viewers. Just another endorsement of the fact that South Asians in the Bay Area have a voice and that the voice is being heard loud and clear.

More »

By Salil Chaturvedi

I’ve often wondered if disability is contagious.

Can one catch it by being around a disabled person, like one contracts a viral or flu? Or perhaps more like the mysterious way in which yawns get transmitted. My experience suggests that that might well be the case, though this needs a deeper scientific study.
Here are some conditions, enumerated in the hope that they will keep you from accidentally catching a bout of disability. More »

By Rohini Mohan

It’s been 60 years since India awoke to life and freedom. A land divided and conquered many times over, in the course of our history we willingly or unwittingly opened our borders to the Dravidians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Huns, the Moguls, the British, the Portuguese and the French. They each left their distinctive mark on our DNA, our culture, our language and our psyche. We morphed, we evolved, we progressed some and we regressed some. And through it all we developed a unique identity that we christened India, Bharat, Hindustan. More »

By Vidya Pradhan

“A Shahrukh movie without a heroine?” was the first reaction of everybody I told about ‘Chak De India’. Certainly in recent years the superstar seems to have been stuck in his Rahul/Raj passionate lover persona, carefully crafted by the Chopras and the Johars. Even the negative roles he played early in his career were demented, obsessive, crazy-for-love characters which he performed with his customary flamboyance.

Occasionally the star has veered into unfamiliar territory, but these efforts have so often been such resounding commercial failures (Swades, Paheli) that he has publicly admitted his nervousness with Chak De, which has him playing the coach of the Indian women’s hockey team. He doesn’t have one heroine, he has sixteen of them!

Chak De is a traditional sports film, dealing with the issues of failure and redemption, team spirit, national integration (versus racial integration in American films), patriotism and girl power. It could have devolved into a clichéd mess, but in director Shimit( Ab Tak Chappan) Amin’s capable hands, it turns out to be a joyride of a film. More »

by Nirupama Subramanian

It was 5.30 am on a dark December morning. The wind gnawed at my face and froze my fingers gripping the edge of the seat in the open Maruti Gypsy. I wished I had worn gloves. The cold was something I had not anticipated on our quest. We were at the entrance of the Bandhavgarh National Park, along with forty other jeeps, with one singular purpose- seeing tigers in the wild. I had seen tigers before, pacing restlessly behind the bars, resting behind high walls and deep trenches, separated by more than those boundaries from the humans that gawked at them. They were creatures that evoked only curiosity and provoked cries of ‘Hey, tiger, move from there’ from unruly spectators. We are masters of confined spaces, tigers are creatures of vast open territories. We have rarely met on neutral ground. More »

Gaurav Rastogi will be blogging his thoughts as he reads the Bhagvad Gita for the first time. He is 35, lives in the Bay Area, curiously religious but not a Sanskrit scholar.

#1 WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T PANIC!

FOR THOSE WHO CAME IN LATE
For those not familiar with the text, here’s a brief backstory. You must know that the Bhagvad Gita is an orthogonal insert into the main story of the Mahabharata which itself is the epic story of the sons of Bharat and their Godfather-style story of deceit and sweet revenge. The Gita is set in the climactic battle scene between two sets of cousins who are fighting over property rights. The bad guys, historically speaking, are the Kauravas, who are fathered by Dhritrashtra – the blind king. The good guys are their cousins - the Pandavas – who are supported by sympathetic friends and relatives, including Krishna Vasudeva. (Vasudeva means land-owner, and was apparently a title of some sorts. Krishna just means black.) More »