The Church of South India has today appointed its first woman bishop.
The Revd Eggoni Pushpalalitha was ordained in 1983 and has most recently been a priest in the Diocese of Nadyal in Andhra Pradesh.
Her appointment comes only days after the Church of Ireland elected its first woman bishop, the Revd Pat (Patricia) Storey as the new Bishop of Meath and Kildare.
Mother Teresa is a profound example of someone who chose to follow Jesus’ example of love and concern by caring for the needs of people living in poverty in Calcutta, India. Mother Teresa’s birthday today reminds us of her profound efforts of love, mercy, and kindness during her many years of service among the poorest of the poor.
Where did Mother Teresa find the strength and the ability to continue to serve in such a life-giving way for so many years? How did she develop her heart and love for the poor? And where did her strength of character and passion for service come from?….
The answers are found in the actions of her daily life, particularly in her regular devotion to prayer and entering into the presence of God by practices of the faith, most remarkably silence.
Indian Christians are celebrating the result of recent elections in Karnataka, a southwestern state known for having the highest rates of violence against Christians. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party which supports extremist groups, has finally lost power “after nine years of unchallenged rule.”
“The BJP is decimated,” reports AsiaNews. “Its defeat is good news especially for social and religious minorities of Karnataka, victims in these years of violence and persecution of the Hindu ultranationalist groups, openly supported by the BJP.”
Listen to it all (about 20 minutes). Those of you who are preachers, please note: this is a model of how to tell a story. It is heartwarming, hilarious, and oh so wonderful because it is true–you could not make this up if you tried–KSH (Hat tip: EDH).
(Note that last season Dickey played with the New York Mets and he will be with Toronto this season–KSH).
This is Kamathipura, the red light district of Mumbai, among the most notorious sex-trafficking locations in the world. I am here as a guest of Bombay Teen Challenge (BTC), a charity that has been fighting human trafficking for more than 20 years, one I joined forces with last year, when two friends and I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and raised $130,000 , much of it from generous and kind-hearted Mets fans. I have come with my two daughters, Gabriel, 11, and Lila, 9, to witness the fruits of our climb ”“ the conversion of a former brothel to a health clinic. I want my daughters to share the experience not so much as a gratitude check, but to learn that each of us has a capacity to make a difference in this world, and to see that God’s grace makes that possible.
Read it all, noting please that its content may not be appropriate for some blog readers.
At a time when Indians are re-examining their society in the light of a single, horrific incident of gang rape, South Africa seems numb – unable to muster much more than a collective shrug in the face of almost unbelievably grim statistics – seemingly far worse than India’s.
Here almost 60,000 rapes are reported to the police each year – more than double the number in India, in a far smaller country.
Experts believe the true figure is at least 10 times that – 600,000 attacks….
Read it all or watch the video report (recommended).
O God of the nations, who didst give to thy faithful servant Henry Martyn a brilliant mind, a loving heart, and a gift for languages, that he might translate the Scriptures and other holy writings for the peoples of India and Persia: Inspire in us, we beseech thee, a love like his, eager to commit both life and talents to thee who gavest them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Both India and China have intense national testing programs to find the brightest students for their elite universities. The competition, the preparation and the national anxiety about the outcomes make the SAT testing programs in the U.S. seem like the minor leagues. The stakes are higher in China and India. The “chosen ones”””those who rank in the top 1%””get their choice of university, putting them on a path to fast-track careers, higher incomes and all the benefits of an upper-middle-class life.
The system doesn’t work so well for the other 99%. There are nearly 40 million university students in China and India. Most attend institutions that churn out students at low cost. Students complain that their education is “factory style” and “uninspired.” Employers complain that many graduates need remedial training before they are fully employable.
For now, the U.S. university system is still far ahead. But over the next decade, there will be a global competition to educate the next generation, and China and India have the potential to change the balance of power.
Every six minutes, a child goes missing in India.
They are boys like Irfan, drugged and abducted at the age of 9 by two men on a motorbike as he walked home one day after playing with friends.
“It was living hell these past two years, trying to figure out where we could find him,” said his father, Iqbal Ali. “I used to run a biscuit bakery, but from the day he disappeared, I got so caught up trying to meet politicians, police and people who claim to do magic to get children back, that I had to shut down my bakery. I had no time for it.”
An official in the Indian Catholic Church has endorsed the idea that participants in sex-selective abortions should be charged with murder.
The backing by Holy Spirit Missionary Sister Helen Saldanha, secretary of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India Office for Women, comes as momentum builds to end female feticide, a practice that finds families terminating a pregnancy because the child they are expecting is a girl.
Filing criminal charges for killing a child in the womb because of its sex would “change the killer attitude” toward girls in Indian society, Sister Helen told Catholic News Service.
Power was restored in India on Wednesday after two days of blackouts that had cast a huge shadow over the nation’s economic ambitions.
On Tuesday, the overburdened electrical grid had collapsed across the whole of northern and eastern India, depriving more than half the country, or around 600 million people, of power. It was the largest blackout in global history in terms of the number of people affected ”” about 10 percent of the world population.
“Superpower India, RIP,” said the banner headline in The Economic Times newspaper.
In the first edition of my book “The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cell Phone,” I reported that, in April 2007, India set a world record by selling 7 million cell phones that month, more telephone connections than any country had ever established in one month. By the time the book was printed, bound and distributed to bookstores, that figure was already out of date. And in 2010, India sold 20 million cell phones three months in a row.
India has now overtaken the United States as the world’s second-largest telephone market, with 857 million SIM cards in circulation and an estimated 600 million individual users. China has more, but India is ahead in phones per capita, is adding them faster and is projected to overtake China before the end of 2012.
What is wonderful about this capitalist “mobile miracle” is that it has accomplished something that our previous socialist policies proclaimed but did little to achieve — it empowered the less fortunate.
When Saraswati Devi awoke from the anesthesia, her clothes were soaked in blood. She was lying on a grass mat on the floor in excruciating pain, and there were no medical staff to answer her cries. She was one of 53 women who underwent surgeries at a “sterilization camp” sponsored by the government of India in its national campaign to drastically cut population growth.
The campaign is underwritten by tens of millions of dollars in American and British foreign-aid funds.
Recently, Nidhi Raichand, 33, and the other editors at health care Web site mDhil decided to find out how young India really feels about liberal sexual behavior.
To the Web site’s English-speaking, upper-class, Internet-savvy audience, they posed the question, “Would you marry a non-virgin?”
The answers were sharply divided, but not the way that you may think….
The growth of Islamic radicalism in Maldives can be traced to the beginning of the last decade. Like in Bangladesh, Pakistani jihadi groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba have been making inroads to indoctrinate young men in a conservative Sunni society, that has been bogged down with slow growth, political authoritarianism (until 2008, certainly) and mushrooming madrassas with Arab funds.
None of this is good news for India. Intelligence circles believe this is part of Pakistan’s strategic outreach, to penetrate Islamic jihadism in India’s periphery, which could be a constraining factor on India’s own development.
Often during a crisis, a single hero or small group of heroes who take action and risk their lives will emerge. But what happened at the Taj was much broader.
During the crisis, dozens of workers ”” waiters and busboys, and room cleaners who knew back exits and paths through the hotel ”” chose to stay in a building under siege until their customers were safe. They were the very model of ethical, selfless behavior.
What could possibly explain it?
Read (or better listen to) it all (another from the long queue of should-have-already-been-posted material).
…[a slum called Annawadi near Mumbai’s airport]… turns out to be a gray zone whose atomized residents want nothing more than, in Primo Levi’s words, “to preserve and consolidate” their “established privilege vis-Ã -vis those without privilege.” Even those who are relatively fortunate, Boo writes, “improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people.”
Describing this undercity blood sport, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” (the ironic title is taken from the “Beautiful Forever” advertisements for Italianate floor tiles that hide Annawadi from view) does not descend into a catalog of atrocity ”” one that a defensive Indian nationalist might dismiss as a drain inspector’s report. The product of prolonged and risky self-exposure to Annawadi, the book’s narrative stitches, with much skillfully unspoken analysis, some carefully researched individual lives. Its considerable literary power is also derived from Boo’s soberly elegant prose, which only occasionally reaches for exuberant neologism (“Glimmerglass Hyatt”) and bright metaphor (“Each evening, they returned down the slum road with gunny sacks of garbage on their backs, like a procession of broken-toothed, profit-minded Santas”).
But “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” is, above all, a moral inquiry in the great tradition of Oscar Lewis and Michael Harrington. As Boo explains in an author’s note, the spectacle of Mumbai’s “profound and juxtaposed inequality” provoked a line of questioning: “What is the infrastructure of opportunity in this society? Whose capabilities are given wing by the market and a government’s economic and social policy? Whose capabilities are squandered? . . . Why don’t more of our unequal societies implode?” Her eye is as shrewdly trained on the essential facts of politics and commerce as on the intimate, the familial and, indeed, the monstrously absurd: the college-going girl who struggles to figure out “Mrs. Dalloway” while her closest friend, about to be forced into an arranged marriage, consumes rat poison, and dies (though not before the doctors attending her extort 5,000 rupees, or $100, from her parents).
Internet giants Google Inc (GOOG.O) and Facebook removed content from some Indian domain websites on Monday following a court directive warning them of a crackdown “like China” if they did not take steps to protect religious sensibilities.
The two are among 21 companies ordered to develop a mechanism to block material considered religiously offensive after private petitioners took them to court over images deemed offensive to Hindus, Muslims and Christians.
Two cases have been brought by individuals against internet companies in India, stoking fears about censorship in the world’s largest democracy.
Kashmir’s small Christian community is in a state of panic. A fortnight ago, a self-styled sharia court issued a fatwa calling for the expulsion of three Christian priests from Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) for “luring the Valley’s Muslims to Christianity”.
The decree by the Islamic court, which has come in the wake of alleged conversion of a handful of Kashmiri Muslims to Christianity, has opened up a new conflict in this strife-torn Indian state.
Pakistan’s civilian government fired its Defense Secretary Wednesday in a rare show of defiance against the country’s powerful Army, which had earlier publicly rebuked Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and ignited speculation the government may fall.
Retired Lt. Gen. Naeem Khalid Lodhi, a senior bureaucrat seen as close to the Army, was dismissed by the government for “gross misconduct and illegal action.” He was replaced by a bureaucrat close to the prime minister.
It’s not yet clear whether Pakistan’s powerful Army will be sufficiently moved to launch a coup and directly rule the country as it has done for approximately half of Pakistan’s 65 year history. But if Mr. Gilani’s defiance pays off, that could indicate a boost for the country’s democratic institutions.
Buddhists from around the world chose India on Wednesday as the headquarters of a new international Buddhist organization and united in their criticism of the Chinese government for trying to prevent the Dalai Lama from speaking at their meeting here in New Delhi.
It was something of a victory for India in what observers increasingly see as a contest with China to win the favor of Buddhists around the world. India is the land where Buddha gained enlightenment and taught, but China has the largest population of Buddhists today.
A priest has been arrested in the Indian state of Kashmir and charged with promoting religious enmity and outraging religious feelings after he baptised 15 Muslim young men who had converted to Christianity.
The Rev. Chander Mani Khanna, rector of All Saints Church in Srinigar in the Church of North India’s Diocese of Amritsar was jailed on 19 Nov 2011 by police following complaints laid against him by a local Muslim leader.
While India does not have a law forbidding religious conversions, a police official told the Hindustan Times Mr. Khanna had been booked for having violated laws against offering “allurements” to converts and for breaching the peace by having baptised the young Muslims.
Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg were a typical Chabad couple””devout, devoted to the Rebbe’s principles, and with a strong sense for self-sacrifice for their fellow Jews. They also suffered from personal tragedy. Their first child was born with Tay-Sachs disease, a genetic disorder that took his life at the age of two.
In another community, the violent deaths of such a young and promising couple might have sent shivers through the leadership, prompting them to pull other emissaries from the field. But Chabad’s leadership did the opposite, immediately sending another couple to take their place.
“It was almost instantly reflexive for some, especially from knowing Gabi and Rivki,” observes Rabbi Chanoch Gechtman, who together with his wife Leah now runs the Chabad House in Mumbai. “Great darkness must be challenged with bright light.”
Irom Sharmila’s mother has a simple dream: sitting down to a meal with her daughter.
Irom hasn’t willingly ingested food or water for 11 years, in protest of a law granting legal immunity to the armed forces for human rights abuses. As the anniversary of her hunger strike nears, her mother imagines what might be.
“I’m still waiting for her to come home,” said Shakhi Devi, 78, holding an album of her daughter’s photos. She rarely visits the 39-year-old, the world’s longest-serving hunger striker, because it’s too painful.
The delegates of the 14th Ordinary Synod have elected The Most Revd. Dr. Philip P. Marandih, Bishop of the Diocese of Patna, as the Moderator and The Rt. Rev. Pradeep Kumar Samantaroy, Bishop of the Diocese of Amritsar, as the Deputy Moderator of the Church of North India for the next triennium.
Hari Kondabolu was born in 1982 in the Little India neighborhood of Flushing, Queens, New York. His parents, both medical professionals, settled there when they first emigrated from Andhra Pradesh, India.
Pursuing the American Dream, the Kondabolu family moved to Floral Park, Queens, when Hari was 8 and his younger brother Ashok was 6. Ashok Kondabolu now performs as Dap, the hype man in the hip-hop group Das Racist. Hari and Ashok occasionally team up for The Untitled Kondabolu Brothers Project, an evening of improvised comic cultural commentary. “It was not my parents’ dream to have their sons in the entertainment field,” says Kondabolu, “but they couldn’t be prouder. Our parents provided us that freedom.”
Ravi and Uma Kondabolu raised their sons to be proud of their Indian heritage, so it is not surprising that cultural identity is a prime factor in their respective arts.
Hari (pronounced HUH-ree) complains in his set that Microsoft Word spell check always tries to correct his name to “Hair.”
India’s best-known Islamic seminary ousted its reformist leader on Sunday, less than seven months after he assumed the post, because he was quoted as speaking favorably of a Hindu nationalist suspected of fomenting deadly anti-Muslim riots.
The reformer, Mullah Ghulam Mohammed Vastanvi, was appointed in January to lead the seminary, Darul Uloom, in the city of Deoband in Uttar Pradesh State. He had become popular in part because of the success of his madrasas, or Islamic schools, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra that bridged traditional Islamic education with the needs of the modern world by teaching students secular subjects like science and computer programming. He had hoped to bring those innovations to Darul Uloom.
A group of Hindus can sue an Edison restaurant for money to travel to India, where they say they must purify their souls after eating meat, a state appellate court panel ruled Monday (July 18).
The decision reinstates a lawsuit filed against Moghul Express, the restaurant that admitted it accidentally served meat-filled pastries to 16 Hindus whose religion forbids them from eating nonvegetarian food.
The diners said the mix-up has harmed them spiritually and monetarily, and that to cleanse themselves of their sin””even though it was committed unknowingly””they must participate in a purification ritual in the Ganges River.
…what is most striking when you talk to employers today is how many of them have used the pressure of the recession to become even more productive by deploying more automation technologies, software, outsourcing, robotics ”” anything they can use to make better products with reduced head count and health care and pension liabilities. That is not going to change. And while many of them are hiring, they are increasingly picky. They are all looking for the same kind of people ”” people who not only have the critical thinking skills to do the value-adding jobs that technology can’t, but also people who can invent, adapt and reinvent their jobs every day, in a market that changes faster than ever.
Today’s college grads need to be aware that the rising trend in Silicon Valley is to evaluate employees every quarter, not annually. Because the merger of globalization and the I.T. revolution means new products are being phased in and out so fast that companies cannot afford to wait until the end of the year to figure out whether a team leader is doing a good job.
Whatever you may be thinking when you apply for a job today, you can be sure the employer is asking this: Can this person add value every hour, every day ”” more than a worker in India, a robot or a computer?
When Pooja Nath was an undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, an elite engineering school in India, she felt isolated. She was one of the few women on campus. While her male classmates collaborated on problem sets, Ms. Nath toiled in the computer lab alone.
“Back then, no one owned a laptop, there was no Internet in the dorm rooms. So everyone in my class would be working in the computer lab together,” she said. “But all the guys would be communicating with each other, getting help so fast, and I would be on the sidelines just watching.”
The experience as a young woman in that culture formed the foundation of her start-up in Silicon Valley, Piazza….