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Diaspora Highlight: How do you bring up Hindus?
@blog_supplement (aka MT) has a great Twitter thread (single-page here) that outlines how Hindu parents often value the wrong markers of acculturation when judging how “Hindu” their (and other) children are. MT contrasts that with the need for actual education of children in Hindu worldviews, praxis, identity, and history versus superficial cultural markers like “ethnic clothing” and “dance shows”. An important question for readers to reflect on is: How do you plan to help educating the next generation of Hindus?
Politics Highlight: Rutgers
Earlier this week, Rutgers professor Asher Ghertner, former director of Rutgers University’s South Asian Studies program, tweeted out that Hinduphobia was a “fake word” and that anyone that uses it is a Hindutva troll. This was retweeted by Hinduphobic bigot and colleague Audrey Truschke. After tweeting that, many people dunked on his idiotic tweet, and he took his twitter private. For more context on what happened at Rutgers, check out our Week 65 and Week 66 updates. Dr. Indu Viswanathan had a very well-memed response to Ghertner’s tweet below.
In the meantime, Hindu On Campus released a comprehensive report that showcases in holistic form, the depth of the racist and Hinduphobic bigotry unleashed by Truschke and her Twitter supporter mobs.
The PDF link is : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CjsIrfOSkGFhwMUrRSrtcA9E8tSTGVAz/view
Politics Highlight: Discussions around Yoga
While the commercialization and descralization of Yoga in the United States has gone at a record page, recently there has been a surge in articles claiming to unpack various “phobias” and “isms” in Yoga. The meme below displays the story arc around Yoga and how narratives are constructed to delink it from Hinduism. The goal of these people is for Hinduism to be treated like some alien backwards pagan cult tied to Nazism, while elements of Hinduism with heavy salience in popular American society such as Yoga, Ayurveda, “manifestation”, meditation, and more are delinked from descriptions of Hinduism.
The below tweet summarizes the issue well:
Aesthetic: Kali Temple in Yangon, Burma
