Welcome to Eternal Path Musings, a newsletter geared towards content that educates, informs, and inspires the Modern Hindu!
To read previous issues, click this link.
This week we feature: a video on how to get children more involved in Hindu temples, a takedown of a report used to attack Hindus, and an aesthetic!
Temple Highlight: How to involve Children in Temple Community Building
Video is from HinduMediaWiki and in a mix of English and Hindi.
Politics Highlight: Refuting the Equality Labs Caste Report
“Equality Labs” is a Hinduphobic organization that claims to stand up for “oppressed” peoples of “South Asia”. Run largely by what appear to be devotees of the controversial and incestuous Tamil philosopher EVR Naicker (known to some as “Periyar”) and Bangladeshi Muslims, it often inserts itself in political debates against Hindu interests, smearing Hindu politicians, and working against proper representation of Hindus in American school textbooks.
With the current social zeitgeist in the US, structures that privilege or hurt certain races and groups have been engaged with more deeply over the last 18 months or so. Equality Labs is at the forefront of trying to (1) Tie a very inaccurate rendering of “caste” to Hinduism, (2) create a narrative where every practicing Hindu is guilty of original sin of “casteism” (3) Divide the Hindu community along caste lines. An interesting note here is that they define themselves as “ a dalit civil rights organization dedicated to ending caste apartheid, gender-based violence, Islamophobia, White Supremacy and religious intolerance” while keeping silent on Islamists, the biggest perpetrators of “religious tolerance” in the Indian subcontinent. Many critics have pointed out their ties to Islamist, Khalistani, and Christian groups (example 1, example 2)
They released a caste report that claimed that laughably high percentages of the Hindu population in the US experienced “caste apartheid” and have been assiduously trying to get that report used as the base for public policy in the US (both domestic and foreign). Richa Gautam wrote an incredibly comprehensive takedown of their caste report, summary here. The takedown is in three parts: