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Showing posts from October 18, 2006


Dwindling crow population hampers Hindu ritual

The funerary rites of a dead person is only complete when the person performing the last rites pays offering to a cow, a dog and crow. There are slight variations in this ritual. In South India , especially in Kerala, the offering is only made to a crow. As of now, there is no dearth in the crow population in Kerala. But the situation is different in several cities in North India . Cows and dogs are available readily but not crows. So people pays offering to crow idols. Zeenews reports about the dwindling population of crows in Allahabad : "As a ritual for the ancestors we are supposed to feed a cow, a dog and a crow. Cow and dog are easily available but we could not find a crow. So we had to observe the tradition with the idol of a crow. That will fulfill the absence in the ritual," said Gautam Chandra Golcha, who performed the rituals with the idol of the crow. The reason: "Crows are dwindling because they feed on the animals who feed

The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

This is the title of a book written by Tristram Stuart. It talks about the Indian connection in European vegetarianism. From the observer review : Stuart makes clear that the Western encounter with India provided crucial weight to pro-vegetarian arguments. Here was a civil, peaceful, enlightened society successfully fuelled by vegetables, pulses and grains. Such a diet seemed an escape from the corruption, debauchery, pollution and strife in the West. Many conservative Christians mocked the Hindus' quaint belief in transmigration, but the doctrine of non-violence is a guiding ethical principle that manifests itself through abstention from meat.  The story of the reverence and awe in which India was held in certain streams of Western thought is a notable corrective to those who see the history of imperialism as solely the high-handed and brutal imposition of Occidental values on indigenous populations. John Zephaniah Holwell, a survivor of the Black H