Thursday, October 17, 2013
Full Audio: 1 Hour, 10 Minutes
(written for Vishwa Sandesh)
Swami Atmananda Giri In Town
By Paramendra Bhagat (www.paramendra.com)
On the evening of October 17 I found myself at the offices of Girija Gautam at 72-28 Broadway Third Floor. It is the best office of all I have been to in the area and a big reason why is the large window through which you can see pretty much all of Jackson Heights. You should check it out when you get a chance.
He took me to the Geeta Temple on Corona Avenue. I had been to the temple once before to step inside, and several times to play Ingress: the location is a portal in the game. He also switched his electric account for the office, gas to follow shortly: I am a network marketer with ACN. If he were to only grab half the people he had show up for his daughter’s grand high school graduation party a few months back, he would hit the top position in the business and be looking at making 100K a month at least, I said to him. But he said time was an issue, and instead he would be happy to share all his contacts with me. Why, thank you. I guess a Columbia Law grad needs to focus on his law practice. This guy could easily be holding public office in Nepal, that part of him comes out in his immense community involvements.
I was born a Hindu, my family is still Hindu, and I have not stopped celebrating any of the festivals.
They say about the Dalai Lama that he has something akin to a PhD in whatever it is that he has accumulated in terms of Buddhist teachings. This guru is also a Vedantic scholar with immense credentials. He was just one step below the Shankaracharya. Enough said. There are the rituals of Dashain, and then there is the prabachan. The wise man speaks, and you sit and listen. The guru had a sense of humor. He spent a few minutes explaining the word “makkhichoos.” I already knew, but thanks for the refresher.
When I got back home I prepared a multimedia presentation of the evening at my Nepal blog that you can find at http://bit.ly/16gPQBs where I have pictures, audio and video files. And I sent it out to my NYC Nepali Google Group with close to 600 members and the Facebook group of the same name with close to 200 members. The guru was just getting started, he was to speak every evening until the 25th.
There is a NRN angle to the swami that was of great interest to me. The bridhashram that the association built in Devghat was done so under this swami’s supervision. The swami also used his immense Bombay connections to set up a fund. Hundreds of people eat for free every day at the premises. This is what Bush might call a sound faith based initiative. You can be secular as a clock and still admire the implementation of the whole operation.
The first evening’s prabachan was on Geeta, easily the crown jewel of the Hindu teachings. What Muna Madan is to Laxmi Devkota’s body of work, what the life of Jesus is in the Bible, Geeta is to volumes upon volumes of Hindu messages. You can meet Nepalis at political and social events, but at an event like this, the connection you form is deeper.
There was prasad after the prabachan. The Gurudwara on 61st and Broadway beats all religious establishments in the area on that count: there is lunch and dinner every day pretty much. My childhood best friend’s wife is a Punjabi he met at engineering college in India: they live in Augusta, Georgia. He is a diversity visa lottery winner. When I was in Indiana, I drove to visit him. My first day of Dashain was dinner at the Divya Dham mandir. Many Nepalis had gathered. That was the first time Girijaji mentioned the swami to me.
He mentioned Hindu rituals and his kids. A guy from Nepal raising a family in America at some level feels the need to keep to his roots. Can’t blame him. On the drive back from the temple, he called up Bhim’s Café and ordered momo for his son. That might not be religious, but that is also a ritual, and it is also to do with roots. Eating momo is the top thing I might have learned in the decade plus I spent in Kathmandu. The dish is a delight.
Girijaji was in Tennessee for a while. I was in Kentucky for five and a half years: that is where I went to college. The first time I got to meet him was at the NRN membership drive event in Times Square a few years back when my friends Temba Sherpa and Jiwan Shrestha brought the association 1,000 members in one month compared to the 400 members the organization had collected in four years. I got John Liu to show up as Chief Guest. Harlem’s State Senator Bill Perkins, the first elected official in the city to come out for Obama, was the original invite. But then he was stuck in Albany Friday night, which is when the gay marriage bill passed. A John Liu staffer texted me late Friday night. Perkins is stuck in Albany, do you want John Liu to show up instead? We moved from texting to the phone. By midnight the confirmation had been made. Liu showed up promptly at 10 AM the following day. The guy at the time was the leading candidate for Mayor.
Audio File 4
Audio File 5
Audio File 6
(written for Vishwa Sandesh)
Swami Atmananda Giri In Town
By Paramendra Bhagat (www.paramendra.com)
On the evening of October 17 I found myself at the offices of Girija Gautam at 72-28 Broadway Third Floor. It is the best office of all I have been to in the area and a big reason why is the large window through which you can see pretty much all of Jackson Heights. You should check it out when you get a chance.
He took me to the Geeta Temple on Corona Avenue. I had been to the temple once before to step inside, and several times to play Ingress: the location is a portal in the game. He also switched his electric account for the office, gas to follow shortly: I am a network marketer with ACN. If he were to only grab half the people he had show up for his daughter’s grand high school graduation party a few months back, he would hit the top position in the business and be looking at making 100K a month at least, I said to him. But he said time was an issue, and instead he would be happy to share all his contacts with me. Why, thank you. I guess a Columbia Law grad needs to focus on his law practice. This guy could easily be holding public office in Nepal, that part of him comes out in his immense community involvements.
I was born a Hindu, my family is still Hindu, and I have not stopped celebrating any of the festivals.
They say about the Dalai Lama that he has something akin to a PhD in whatever it is that he has accumulated in terms of Buddhist teachings. This guru is also a Vedantic scholar with immense credentials. He was just one step below the Shankaracharya. Enough said. There are the rituals of Dashain, and then there is the prabachan. The wise man speaks, and you sit and listen. The guru had a sense of humor. He spent a few minutes explaining the word “makkhichoos.” I already knew, but thanks for the refresher.
When I got back home I prepared a multimedia presentation of the evening at my Nepal blog that you can find at http://bit.ly/16gPQBs where I have pictures, audio and video files. And I sent it out to my NYC Nepali Google Group with close to 600 members and the Facebook group of the same name with close to 200 members. The guru was just getting started, he was to speak every evening until the 25th.
There is a NRN angle to the swami that was of great interest to me. The bridhashram that the association built in Devghat was done so under this swami’s supervision. The swami also used his immense Bombay connections to set up a fund. Hundreds of people eat for free every day at the premises. This is what Bush might call a sound faith based initiative. You can be secular as a clock and still admire the implementation of the whole operation.
The first evening’s prabachan was on Geeta, easily the crown jewel of the Hindu teachings. What Muna Madan is to Laxmi Devkota’s body of work, what the life of Jesus is in the Bible, Geeta is to volumes upon volumes of Hindu messages. You can meet Nepalis at political and social events, but at an event like this, the connection you form is deeper.
There was prasad after the prabachan. The Gurudwara on 61st and Broadway beats all religious establishments in the area on that count: there is lunch and dinner every day pretty much. My childhood best friend’s wife is a Punjabi he met at engineering college in India: they live in Augusta, Georgia. He is a diversity visa lottery winner. When I was in Indiana, I drove to visit him. My first day of Dashain was dinner at the Divya Dham mandir. Many Nepalis had gathered. That was the first time Girijaji mentioned the swami to me.
He mentioned Hindu rituals and his kids. A guy from Nepal raising a family in America at some level feels the need to keep to his roots. Can’t blame him. On the drive back from the temple, he called up Bhim’s Café and ordered momo for his son. That might not be religious, but that is also a ritual, and it is also to do with roots. Eating momo is the top thing I might have learned in the decade plus I spent in Kathmandu. The dish is a delight.
Girijaji was in Tennessee for a while. I was in Kentucky for five and a half years: that is where I went to college. The first time I got to meet him was at the NRN membership drive event in Times Square a few years back when my friends Temba Sherpa and Jiwan Shrestha brought the association 1,000 members in one month compared to the 400 members the organization had collected in four years. I got John Liu to show up as Chief Guest. Harlem’s State Senator Bill Perkins, the first elected official in the city to come out for Obama, was the original invite. But then he was stuck in Albany Friday night, which is when the gay marriage bill passed. A John Liu staffer texted me late Friday night. Perkins is stuck in Albany, do you want John Liu to show up instead? We moved from texting to the phone. By midnight the confirmation had been made. Liu showed up promptly at 10 AM the following day. The guy at the time was the leading candidate for Mayor.
Friday, October 04, 2013
Durga Pooja In Gorigama
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| English: Devotees of the Festival Chhath Parva in Janakpur, Nepal (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Durga Pooja In Gorigama
By Paramendra Bhagat (www.paramendra.com)
Gorigama is a neighboring village to my homevillage Gonarpura in Nepal. Gonarpura is not that far from Janakpur. What I most remember about Gorigama is the DurgaPooja there. Chhath was the top festival in the culture I grew up in. Jitiya dashe Dashain, Dashain solhe sukrati, Sukrati chhabe Chhaith. 10 days after the festival of Jitiya we start celebrating Dashain, 16 days after Dashain is over, we celebrate Diwali. Sukrati is another name for Diwali. Six days after Diwali is Chhath. So goes the saying.
In the culture of the hill Nepalis Dashain is the top festival, Chhath is not even celebrated, although Chhath is also a Hindu thing. But maybe it is a Mithila thing, because even Muslims in Bihar are known to celebrate Chhath. In my culture we don’t do tika in Dashain. That is a hill thing. But many Teraiwasis have learned to do the tika thing.
I would be home for vacation from the school I attended in Kathmandu. Most years my Dashain vacation, which incorporated Diwali (one year it didn’t), would end just a day before Chhath. That was the Panchayat era cultural insensitivity.
On the days of Durga Pooja late in the afternoon streams of people would walk from my village to Gorigama. The sight I most remember is all these people who would carry their flip-flops in their hands for most of the walk, and when they were almost there, they would go to the nearest pond, and wash their feet, and put on their flip-flops. They wore the flip-flops only on special occasions. Otherwise they walked around bare feet. It is called being a Third World country.
Local artisans created the most beautiful mud statues of Durga Mata. And then when the festival was over, half the village would go lay the statue down in some pond or river. Such was the custom.
The festival grounds, usually the public school, would have stalls of food and stages of entertainment. The local drama companies got to perform. This was Bollywood to most people in my homevillage for whom Bollywood was not yet a reality. To most people in my village at the time both Nepali and Hindi sounded like English: foreign. There were high school students who would sit themselves in the mango groves reading up cheap Ved Prakash Sharma novels who would would tell their parents they were “studying.”
The festival season would start after the flood and monsoon season ended. You cleaned up and decorated your homes for Diwali because the rains are gone until they are back next year. But after Chhath there was no major festival for months.
Before I moved to New York I was in Indiana. There I went to a local county festival once with my then wife and her family. I was the only non white person at the fair. The festival reminded me of the Durga Pooja festival in Gorigama.
Rumor had it the biggest Durga Pooja festival celebration happened in Calcutta. I have never been. And the biggest Chhath celebration was in Patna, along the banks of the Ganga river. I have been to Patna but not for Chhath. Some day.
In the mid 80s my father was a dealer for the Santosh radio that was manufactured in Calcutta, probably the first one in eastern Terai. My brother is named Santosh.
Gorigama was part of the same local village unit as my homevillage. There was Gorigama, and the adjacent Hari, and Hriduwa not far away. I had relatives in Hari. My grandfather’s sister lived there with her two sons, one of whom was a teacher. My grandfather had no expressed desire to become mukhiya. But then one day a committee in the neighboring village decided he was the appropriate person, and they came and lifted him up while he was sitting for dinner. I witnessed the scene. They took him away. When he came back, he was garlanded and had abeer – red powder – all over his face. He had just become Pradhan Panch. I guess he acquired a taste for it. Then they started holding elections, and he contested and won several times. He remained Pradhan Panch until the system got toppled, and there were still people urging him to run. He didn’t. A few years later one morning he headed out to the holy cities of India to spend the rest of his days as a sadhu, never to return. The family performed his cremation rites in absentia a few months back.
His father, my greatgrandfather, was a local rags to riches story. He started with very little, and his other branches of the family were proof, and went on to own more land than anyone else in the village. A key element of his success was the strong urge to save. My greatgrandmother knew how to save. She would get the last drop out of every mango, every time. My grandfather’s other sister was married to the Pradhan Panch of the neighboring Badiya. A granddaughter of hers, my cousin, recently moved to Minnesota from Nepal after getting married. Small world.
At the Durga Pooja festival in Gorigama I would often get to meet my relatives from Hari and Badiya, and also Banchauri nearby. My grandfather’s brother’s daughter was married in Banchauri. Her daughter’s son now lives in New Jersey. Hello Suneel.
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