Tattva

I’ll start with a conversation I had a couple of years ago while on holiday in California. While there, I went to a charity cultural show type thing organized by the local Hindu community and after the main event there was a dinner and a collection of stalls for various organizations to showcase their work, raise funds and get new members. There was one which caught my attention because it had a group of three people dressed up in white gowns and tilaks on their heads which gave them the look of holy people who might have just walked out of a mandir on the banks of the Ganga. More surprising to me was that two of the people were actually white Americans and so to me looked even more out of place at this gathering. The third was an American born Indian guy and it was with him that I started talking. Read the rest of this entry »

Sanskrit is oldest language in the world which has retained its structure and vocabulary in the pristine form. Sanskrit is very much a spoken language today and it is spoken by an increasing number of people. Below is the second lesson in Spoken Sanskrit. In the first lesson covered in March, we covered various ways of greeting in Sanskrit. In this lesson we learn more sentences which we use in daily life.

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The shloka below is an extract from ‘Vishnu sahasranam’. Parvati, the divine consort of Lord Shiva asks him to tell an easy way for all the scholars to chant the 1000 names of Lord Vishnu.

Sri Rama Rama Ramethi  Rame Rame Manorame
Sahasranama Tathulyam Rama Nama Varaname

Description: Lord Shiva says that the name of Lord Rama is the sweetest of all the words and chanting this name would be equivalent to chanting the whole Vishnu Sahasranama as it is the base of all the names. Read the rest of this entry »

History: The Hindu Calendar has its origins in Vedānga (a supplement to Vedas) called Jyotisha (literally, “celestial body study”). After the Vedic period, scholars such as Āryabhatta (5th century CE), Varāhamihira (6th century CE) and Bhāskara (12th century CE) contributed to the development of the Hindu Calendar. The most widely used authoritative text for the Hindu Calendars is the Sūrya Siddhānta, thought to have been written around 10th century CE.

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