'How can Hindus protest efforts to ban an edition of the Gita in parts of Russia, and force a publisher to withdraw an academic critique of Hinduism, all in the same breath? It makes the Hindu community seem petty, self-serving, and hypocritical. Episodes like this allow Hinduism to be "owned" by the most conservative, intolerant, extremist voices. These people do not speak for me, and they certainly don't represent the form of Hinduism I practice and love," Princeton University's Hindu chaplain Vineet Chander tells Rediff.com's Arthur J Pais.
'For over a decade, the United States has been shaping the contours of Hinduism. It has been doing this from the perspective of upper caste and conservative interests,' Professor Shefali Chandra tells Rediff.com's Arthur J Pais.
The preferred course of action to challenge Wendy Doniger's many published works and polemical Hinduphobic statements is to debate it, Aseem Shukla tells Rediff.com's Arthur J Pais.
On Tuesday, a judge in the US denied a request by Aakash Dalal's attorney to have his trial sent to another district and conducted under a different judge since the adverse publicity the case had gathered in the present court area in the Bergen county of New Jersey. Arthur J Pais reports.
With two decades of experience as a teacher, researcher and administrator at Princeton University, Sanjeev Kulkarni, a professor of electrical engineering and director of the Keller Center, is described by some colleagues as a 'seasoned university citizen' who has made a name for himself in interdisciplinary courses.
Raghuveer Nayak, an Indian-American multi-millionaire, was sentenced to two years in prison and fined $500,000 in a decade-long medical scam by a federal judge in Chicago on Monday.
Lawyer and scholar Vinay Sitapati says the 'Get Modi' strategy largely misses the efforts to prosecute people evidently guilty of violence and murders in the Gujarat riots in favour of "a narrow quest to stop one man from becoming prime minister."
The Guruvaayoorappan temple in Morganville, New Jersey, which is the biggest of its kind in North America, has now turned into a Vrindavan of sorts with the grand opening of a cow sanctuary On the premises.
"Many people in America see animals, particularly cows, as meat...animals have a soul, personality, they interact," says Sankar Sastri, who runs the Lakshmi Cow Sanctuary in Pennsylvania, USA.
The Dalals, whose son faces 30 years in prison if found guilty of masterminding domestic terror acts, have decided to take their case to the Indian-American community.
'The challenges of the world are too great for any one religious tradition to address alone... The best way to learn about other religions is not from books, but from people... Go talk to someone from a different faith tradition. Get to know them. Build up some trust.' Dr Katharine Rhodes Henderson, who jointly won Hofstra University's Guru Nanak Prize for inter-faith champions in the United States, discusses religion and the challenges of extremism in this lively interview with Rediff.com's Arthur J Pais.
One of the first things Meera Chandrasekhar noticed at Brown University, where she was enrolled in the doctorate program in physics, was that there were just three women and some two dozen men.
Founder Shilen Amin tells Arthur J Pais how far the South Asian International Film Festival has come since its inception 10 years ago
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'Both resisted cruel white rule through non-violence. But Mandela's is a singular story. He never lost faith in his ideals and goal even when he was in prison for many years,' Anant Singh, who produced the Mandela biopic, tells Rediff.com's Arthur J Pais.
Arthur J Pais remembers the time when Manna Dey recorded his first ever Malayalam song for the film Chemmen.
Director Ritesh Batra discusses his film, The Lunchbox, which releases this week.
'At a festival that has shown so many brilliant films, I cannot be more thrilled to receive this award,' said Slave's director Steve McQueen.
Nearly a thousand people from different faiths gathered today to pay homage to the six Sikh worshippers gunned down inside a Gurdwara by a white supremacist here last year, as a sea of candles and emotional tributes marked the tragic incident's anniversary.
Millions of kids and young adults were terrified of Pran and believed him to be a villain in real life, writes Arthur J Pais, in his tribute to the legendary actor who passed away on July 12.
The brilliant Indian boy star of the musical The Jungle Book, currently playing in Chicago, is being applauded for his rare talent.
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