Gandhi's sex life laid bare in new book

• Gandhi's sex life laid bare in new book

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  • By Adam Plowright

  • A new book on Mahatma Gandhi has delved into the intimate life of the Indian icon whose famous vow of chastity did not prevent him sleeping with naked women and conducting bizarre sex "experiments".

    "Gandhi: Naked Ambition" by British historian Jad Adams sheds new light on the spiritual leader and independence hero whose spartan existence and resistance to earthly pleasures are an integral part of his popular image.

    The book has been released in Britain and will be available soon in India where it is bound to make waves in a country where Gandhi's image is fiercely protected and a source of national pride.

  • 
  • "One of things you find about Gandhi is how much he wrote about sex," Adams told AFP by telephone from his home in London. "When we look at his sexuality, what happens is that he has a perfectly normal sex life for the first part of his life, one that would be recognisable to almost anyone in the world.
  • Adams says he has no evidence that Gandhi broke his vow of chastity with any of the women, though he was defining the idea in a rather limited way. "He's talking about penetration. However he's defining sex so narrowly that he's ignoring a lot of activities that many people would consider sensual, if not actively sexual.

  • Adams believes the "experiments" were like a game of striptease in which there was non-contact sexual activity.

    "He wanted to see if sex could be controlled because he felt it was such a powerful force," he said.

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पांच फ़णों वाला नागराज

• News Description

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  • कर्नाटक में मंगलूर के निकट सुब्रह्मण्य में पांच फ़ण वाले दुर्लभ नागराज के दर्शनों के लिए आजकल जिज्ञासुओं एवं श्रद्धाजुओं का हुजूम उमड़ पड़ा है.
  • हिन्दू धर्मशास्त्रों के अनुसार भगवान विष्णु हजार फ़ण वाले शेषनाग की शय्या पर शयन करते हैं जबकि लौकिक दृष्टि से एकाधिक फ़ण वाले नागराज का अस्तित्व दुर्लभ माना जाता है. लेकिन मंगलूर में पिछले दिनों एक मकान में अचानक प्रकट हुए पांच फ़ण वाले नागराज ने यह सिद्ध कर दिया है कि पारलौकिक सहस्र्फ़णीय शेषनाग के पंचफ़णीय लौकिक वंशज इसी पृथ्वी में अस्तित्व में हैं.

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Haindava Keralam - Home Minister's firm paying 'Silence' Money to Maoists - Subramanian Swamy

• Haindava Keralam - global community of dedicated Hindu Keralites with a peace mission

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  • Statement of Dr. Subramanian Swamy, President of the Janata Party. 

  • I demand that the Prime Minister drop Mr. P.Chidambaram from the Home Ministry  because he is conflicted in his office, by his private interests, in performance of his duties.
    

    
    

    I have documents with me to show that Mr. Chidambaram has had fiduciary and financial relations with Vedanta Resources Inc. as a paid Director on their Board as well as he was receiving fees for various legal opinion provided by him from time to time.  He has also enjoyed at Vedanta Inc expense account his personal hospitality in London and provided with appropriate companionship there. Vedanta Inc has been paying the Maoists 'silence' money on a commission basis for every wagon of ore shipped out of mines in Orissa. Hence how can Mr. Chidambaram be seen to be above board in dealing with Maoists ?
    

    
    

    Mr. Chidambaram is also culpable in the IPL controversy because as Finance Minister he had blocked the Reserve Bank of India from taking action in the IPL bets and payments made in foreign exchange, and also the hotel bills in South Africa and other places were paid for in cash in foreign exchange. Mr. Chidambaram also blocked the CBI registering a case of match fixing on which a detailed investigation report was submitted to him.  He scuttled the probe by saying that it is the BCCI which should go and press a complaint for an FIR to be registered and not the Government.

    
    

    Hence the Prime Minister cannot rely on Mr. Chidambaram to get to the bottom of IPL, since the latter has an interest that will scuttle the present ongoing probe into the matter.
                                        ( SUBRAMANIAN  SWAMY )

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We should fear alien life: Stephen Hawking

• We should fear alien life: Stephen Hawking

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  • LONDON
  • The scientist, who is paralysed by motor neurone disease, warned that contact with alien life could spell disaster for the human race.

     

    "If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the American Indians."

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ExpressBuzz- Kanchi seer opposes religious conversion

• ExpressBuzz-Print

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  • By Dennis Selvan 
  • Kanchi seer opposes religious conversion 
  • In what is understood to be a renewed political activism of the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, Sri Jayendra Saraswati has taken a serious view of what he termed forcible conversions of people in the war-torn Sri Lanka, and is staying in ‘close touch’ with the happenings in the island nation.
    According to the pontiff, the aftermath of a war is always conducive to conversion, particularly to Christianity because the Biblical themes of persecution and exile instantly resonate with them. He is going to oppose “forcible conversions and proselytizing by force, allurement or by fraudulent means,” anywhere because it is against the grain of Hindu ethos.
    In an exclusive interview, the pontiff said he was going to sensitize Hindus on Indian spirituality and to achieve that end he would organise a padayatra of madhathipathis and sadhus soon.
  • KANCHEEPURAM:
  • He said when Sri Lanka was recently trying to enact an anti-conversion bill, he was elated, and then his spirit drooped when the imminent internal strife and subsequent election somehow postponed the legislation.
    Recalling his inter-faith meet with Vatican’s head for interreligious dialogue, Cardinal Jean Louis Tauran, and Mumbai’s Cardinal Oswald Gracias several months ago, he questioned if the Roman Catholic Pope could give an assurance to Israel to the effect that “the Catholic Church would desist from all missionary and conversion activities among the Jews” why cannot they take a similar stand in India.

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The Return of Christian Terrorism | Belief | AlterNet

• The Return of Christian Terrorism | Belief | AlterNet

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  • Religion Dispatches / By Mark Jurgensmeyer
  • Threats of right-wing violence have doubled in the past year. What is behind the latest upsurge in the movement to create a Christian theocratic state?
  

  • The Southern Poverty Law Center, founded by Morris Dees, which has closely watched the rise of right-wing extremism in this country for many decades, declares that threats and incidents of right-wing violence have risen 200% in this past year—unfortunately coinciding with the tenure of the first African-American president in US history. When Chip Berlet, one of this country’s best monitors of right-wing extremism, warned in a perceptive essay last week on RD that the hostile right-wing political climate in this country has created the groundwork for a demonic new form of violence and terrorism, I fear that he is correct.

    Christian Warrior, Sacred Battle

    Though these new forms of violence are undoubtedly political and probably racist, they also have a religious dimension.

  • The more significant Christian position that Bray and Hill advanced is related to the End-Time theology of the Rapture as thought to be envisaged by the New Testament book of Revelation. These are ideas related, in turn, to Dominion Theology, the position that Christianity must reassert the dominion of God over all things, including secular politics and society.
  • At its hardest edge, the movement requires the creation of a kind of Christian politics to set the stage for America’s acceptance of the second coming of Christ. In this context, it is significant today that in some parts of the United States, over one-third of the opponents of the policies of President Barack Obama believe he is the Antichrist as characterized in the End-Times Rapture scenario.

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On Faith Panelists Blog: The theft of yoga - Aseem Shukla

• On Faith Panelists Blog: The theft of yoga - Aseem Shukla

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  • co-founder, Hindu American Foundation

    Aseem Shukla

    Associate Professor in urologic surgery at the University of Minnesota medical school.

  • The theft of yoga

  • Why is yoga severed in America's collective consciousness from Hinduism? Yoga, meditation, ayurvedic natural healing, self-realization--they are today's syntax for New Age, Eastern, mystical, even Buddhist, but nary an appreciation of their Hindu origins. It is not surprising, then, that Hindu schoolchildren complain that Hinduism is conflated only with caste, cows, exoticism and polytheism--the salutary contributions and philosophical underpinnings lost and ignored. The severance of yoga from Hinduism disenfranchises millions of Hindu Americans from their spiritual heritage and a legacy in which they can take pride.

    Hinduism, as a faith tradition, stands at this pass a victim of overt intellectual property theft, absence of trademark protections and the facile complicity of generations of Hindu yogis, gurus, swamis and others that offered up a religion's spiritual wealth at the altar of crass commercialism. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, under whose tutelage the Beatles steadied their mind and made sense of their insane fame, packaged the wonders of meditation as Transcendental Meditation (TM) just as an entrepreneur from here in Minneapolis applied the principles of Ayurveda to drive a commercial enterprise he coined as Aveda. TM and Aveda are trademarked brands--a protection not available to the originator of their brand--Hinduism itself. And certainly these masters benefited millions with their contributions, but in agreeing to ditch Hinduism as the source, they left these gifts orphaned and unanchored.

    The Los Angeles Times last week chronicled this steady disembodying of yoga from Hinduism. "Christ is my guru. Yoga is a spiritual discipline much like prayer, meditation and fasting [and] no one religion can claim ownership," says a vocal proponent of "Christian themed" yoga practices. Some Jews practice Torah yoga, Kabbalah yoga and aleph bet yoga, and even some Muslims are joining the act. They are appropriating the collective wisdom of millenia of yogis without a whisper of acknowledgment of yoga's spiritual roots.

    Not surprisingly, the most popular yoga journals and magazines are also in the act. Once yoga was no longer intertwined with its Hindu roots, it became up for grabs and easy to sell. These journals abundantly refer to yoga as "ancient Indian," "Eastern" or "Sanskritic," but seem to assiduously avoid the term "Hindu" out of fear, we can only assume, that ascribing honestly the origins of their passion would spell disaster for what has become a lucrative commercial enterprise. The American Yoga Association, on its Web site, completes this delinking of yoga from Hinduism thusly:

    "The common belief that Yoga derives from Hinduism is a misconception. Yoga actually predates Hinduism by many centuries...The techniques of Yoga have been adopted by Hinduism as well as by other world religions."

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India Retold: BRAND IPL: LOTUS DESPITE MODI AND MUCK?

• India Retold: BRAND IPL: LOTUS DESPITE MODI AND MUCK?

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  • Lalit Modi would perhaps not have expected that exposing Shashi Tharoor would generate the kind of Tsunami it has. He should have known that the Congress party has always successfully used/bought/arm-twisted people into hastily burying any scam, no matter how big, if it even as much as singes a powerful Congress leader. Shashi Tharoor was no ordinary Congressman. He was one of the star members of the new club of 'educated' and elitist Indians that Rahul Gandhi was crafting to get himself projected by the English media as the Great New And Only Hope for India, before the 2014 general elections .
    
    By stripping Tharoor of the veneer that had made him very popular among English-speaking Indians and revealing his ugly, dishonest innards that were indistinguishable from those of the many dehati thieves that our flawed systems have thrown up as leaders, Lalit Modi committed an unpardonable crime. How could he dare to, when no else did, tell the world that Tharoor should actually be spelled 'Thugroor'?
  • There is going to be serious egg on some faces over the next few days. But, there is hope that brand IPL will not only not take a hit but will also grow bigger and stronger. This hope has arisen not because of what people have been writing and speaking while keeping the brand distinct from Modi and others, but because of the manner in which Modi is taking on the state and its instruments, including the media, which suggests that he guarded at least the brand zealously.
    
    If, however, everything been as putrid as the hysterical reaction to 'Thugroorgate' is making it out to be, then the muck is not going to go out with Modi. Then, no matter who replaces him, everything will, away from public gaze, slide back to where it was. And who knows, Tharoor the Mentor - fixer in plain language - might quietly get his ministership and IPL team back too.

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