Too American

I hate being thought of as typical. Typical anything. I feel dismissed if someone says "she's just being a girl" or "she's so American" or whatever it is. Maybe that is where my at-odds-ness comes from. In other words, I have tremendous difficulty fitting in with the culture around me, no matter where I am. I have a need to be different and stand out. Unfortunately, that instinct doesn't mesh too well with an Indian culture where individuals are not as important as the whole and family is the smallest unit.

Someone in the comments mentioned the idea that converts to Hinduism treat it like Christianity and approach it from a Christian, which is to say western, mindset. I think that is sometimes the case. There are some western Hindus I see who seem to have replaced Jesus with Krishna and basically have a Baptist religion going on! But I don't really think our brains doom us to only be able to understand religion one way. I'm sure there are tendencies in us Americans to see things a certain way, but I do think those can change. Also, not everything is as western in our brains as you would expect and not all Indians have an "Indian mindset."

Several years ago a man named Whorf published a paper about how our native language effects our thoughts. He posited that if our language did not have a word for something, then we would be unable to know what it was. I'm pretty sure his was the theory behind the strange idea that the Native Americans, when Europeans first arrived, were unable to see the ships because they had no concept for that type of vessel (which seems ridiculous to me. They new what boats were, it just looked a bit different!). It later turned out that Whorf had no research whatsoever to back up these claims.

Our native language (and culture) does not doom us to never being able to understand another perspective. However, it does have effects. This article my Dad recently sent me illustrates it perfectly.

So yes, I do think that we all have a default way that we approach the world that is based on the culture around us and the way our parents teach us. But it isn't unchangeable and it also isn't always what you expect.

In many ways, I grew up with two cultures and two cultural ideals. There is the American culture around me and the Indian culture whose ideals were taught to me in my home. I have had tremendous difficulty reconciling the two.

There are a lot of ways in which I think like an American.

I like personal space, for example. Also, I believe in personal social mobility and that our birth should not be our destiny. Those are pretty American, or at least Western, ideas.

On the other hand, there are distinctly Indian things in my brain too and they often put me strongly at odds with those around me.

One example is that my first boyfriend really believed in progress. He believed that improvements in technology and education are making a better and better world, that we are growing and becoming greater, that a golden age is still in front of us. I could not understand his perspective at all. I'm very stuck in the idea of cyclical time and that we started out good and are running down (like entropy). But progress is one of the main ideas that America is built on.

The biggest thing that has made me unable to fit in is my ideas about marriage. By a huge margin, Americans believe that love is important in marriage and that one must be in love before getting married while Indians believe that romantic love is not a trustworthy emotion and has little to no connection to marriage.

I have both these messages competing for my loyalty and it's making it nearly impossible to date like a "normal" American.

If I say to my mother, "I'm not sure that I love this boy", she will respond, "You're so American. Love is fleeting. He's nice to you, he's a good man, what else do you think love is?"

Strangely enough, said American boyfriend would like for the woman he is with to love him. She thinks he is also being too picky.

What does love have to do with marriage?

I don't know. Growing up, I got the idea that the two are unrelated, or at least that you can create love from nothing with enough dedication and hard work.

But then when I moved out of my parents' house I started hearing something very different.

However, still stuck with my ideas about dedication and hard work, I've spent years with various boyfriends, trying to force myself into the mold of the perfect wife. Yet, I don't end up married. Because these American men don't want the perfect wife, they want someone genuine and that I don't know how to be.

Now that I'm nearing thirty and I'm still unmarried, I'm getting these mixed messages stronger and stronger. Of course, everyone just wants for me to be happy. They have very different ideas about how I should get there.

Love is not something that I can put into words. It is not something I am sure about. It can't be measured or quantified or located in a physical way. Like faith, I guess. And yet I have faith and I don't have any grasp on love.

How important is that spark, the sizzle, the chemistry, the feeling of being in love? Whether important or not, Americans want it in their relationships and I think that I want it too. I've tried the dedication and hard work route and it has not led me to happiness, so it's time to try to approach relationships like the American that I am.

I am taking a year off from dating in order to get a handle on myself and figure out how I am going to fit myself into the culture that I live in. Until I take a breather, and get my feet back under me, it is not fair to the men in my life for me to be dating.

Some Resources

Someone commented and left this link a couple weeks ago:
http://forum.advaitaforum.com/

I haven't done too much exploring there yet, but it seems like it will be a very useful resource. It is put together by Chinmaya, the organization that I now belong to. You can also read more at: http://www.advaitaforum.org/ And there is also a link to their Facebook group.

I also found something else neat. During my trip to Rosetta Stone in New York, I was given an ipod touch, so now I can experience apps (I've been so jealous of people with iphones!)

Going through the app store I found one called ipooja, which seems like an awesome idea. It comes with one pooja already on it for free, and the idea is that you can buy others (although their store doesn't seem to have much in it, so I hope they will come out with more).

These are the elaborate poojas for certain occasions and not a simple, every day type. But it has a section where it tells you all the things you need for the pooja, then how to set it up, then what to do and what chants to say, etc. It just guides you step by step.

I think this is an awesome idea! Here is their website: http://www.ipooja.com/ipooja.html


Looking into it further, I found some other similar apps, like this ipuja:
http://ipuja.weboot.com/

Here's one that answers questions about Hindu rituals and customs:
http://www.appstorehq.com/hinduritualsandroutines-iphone-2417/app

The only one I've tried so far is the ipooja, but I'm looking forward to downloading the others and seeing how they are.

It's amazing, isn't it, how technology has changed our lives. Only ten years ago, I wasn't sure what this whole "Inter-net" thing was. And look at me now! :)

ETA: I just tried the ipuja and I wasn't able to get it to work. I might try redownloading it. Also I found some other neat apps. If you look up "Hindu" in itunes app store you'll find things like
bhajan lyrics
prayers to use in Aartis
A Ganesha picture to which you can offer flowers, ring a bell, and break a coconut
And a low price one called imantra, in which you move virtual mala beads and listen to various different mantras that you select.

Holiday: Navaratri/Dussehra

Didn't I warn you that it is non stop holidays during this time of the year? :)

You may have seen Sita reference this holiday in the comments. It is indeed time to start preparing for the next one. I hope that in future years this will be smoother for me, but this being my first year celebrating the holidays, it is extremely overwhelming and they just keep coming!

Navaratri starts this year on Friday October 8th and goes for nine days. In fact, the name means "Nine Nights." Then a tenth day, culminating the holiday, is called Dussehra.

One of the things I like about this festival is that it is focused on the feminine side of the divine. It worships the divine mother. The first three days are devoted to Dhurga, a warrior and a very strong female. The second three days are devoted to Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and prosperity and the final three days are devoted to Saraswati, goddess of wisdom and learning. All are forms of shakti, the female divine energy. Other forms of shakti are also worshiped, in some places there is a different goddess for each day.

According to Wikipedia there are actually a number of Navatri holidays throughout the year, but this one is the most important, the Maha Navatri.

I'm told that it is celebrated differently in different places. In some places, steps are placed with idols on them, which is called golu.


In other places, the Garba dance is performed. Here's an example of Garba:


This is a time to respect and be grateful for the tools of trade and in South India, children often start school at the end of this holiday.

Anyone who knows of any misinformation here, please let me know and I'll edit it! Thanks.

I heart Rosetta Stone (and some other stuff)

I have been away from the Internet for a whole two days! Oh my goodness. So, that's why I didn't respond earlier to the comments on the last post. I think there is a lot of material there, so I'll need to go through carefully and bring some of the discussion into new posts.

The reason I've been away from the Internet is Rosetta Stone. You all know that I am a huge fan of theirs. I've been happily learning Hindi with them for the last year and I love the way that I am able to feel the language on a very deep level because they don't use translation and my brain goes through the work to puzzle out what each thing means. (Proof that it is working, a new person friended me on Facebook recently and left a comment on one of my photos in Hindi and I was very proud to realize that I understood it and was able to respond. I still have a long way to go before I'm fluent, but I'm making good progress).

Rosetta Stone has a Facebook fan page and I am there frequently, making comments and helping out new users. Apparently, Rosetta Stone took notice of this. They called me up and asked me if I would like to go to New York as a guest for the launch of their newest product. They invited two other people as well (and one of them is also a Hindi learner! He is learning Hindi so that he can communicate with his Indian fiancé's family. He started learning it as a surprise for her, isn't that sweet?).

The new product is another big leap forward for Rosetta Stone. As a company, they are constantly researching new learning methods, listening to customer feedback, and trying to make the very best language learning product possible. Five years ago I had their first offering and it had some problems. Last year I discovered that they had been working on it and continuing to improve it and they had come out with an amazing new version, version 3, that solved all my issues. Now they have version 4 launched.

It has the same great course that version 3 had, easing you into learning and helping your brain to figure out what things mean based on series of closely related pictures. Now they also have a way to play games with other learners of your language, chat with native speakers, and have live coaching sessions entirely in your target language. They also have an iphone app as well as mp3 files so that you can learn where ever you go.

These last couple of days I have been in New York, being treated like a total celebrity. They gave me a free copy of the version 4 Hindi! I can't believe how they are paying back the love that I have for them :)

One of the things I really like about the company is that everyone who works there is passionate about language learning. Every person I met, I asked what language he or she was learning. Every single one of them is learning a language with the Rosetta Stone software. Many of them started using Rosetta Stone before they worked there. Their staff are anthropologists, linguists, programmers, game developers, all sorts of amazing skills are being brought to this product!

This new version will allow me to ease my way into actually speaking with people and I can't wait to get started, which is a great new motivation, since I've been feeling run-down and have not been practicing my Hindi like I should.

This pic is posted on the Rosetta Stone twitter feed.

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I came to another conclusion while on this trip. I decided that I am going to stop wearing a bindi every day. I think I'm being too obsessive about it and that it can be off-putting to people to see that and it's making me seem harsh and unapproachable.

I would like to learn to better regulate how I fit in with those around me and to choose what I wear based on what impression I want to create.

I will now wear a bindi when I feel like it or when the occasion is appropriate.

Gunas (qualities)

Giving the politically charged stuff a rest for a bit (somehow getting a new issue of Hinduism Today, always leads me into the political stuff!)...

I wanted to do a quick post about gunas because that's a word I use frequently and it's something that I often can't find an English equivalent for.

To start of, I'm not honestly sure where this comes from. Wikipedia says the three guna system comes from Samkhya, one of the classic schools of Indian philosophy. For me, I was taught growing up that this was just how the world works.

The idea is that all things in creation are made up of different proportions of three subtle qualities. I say "subtle" because this is not on the physical level like atoms or molecules. There is a physical world and body and there is a subtle world and body.

The three gunas are:

Rajas: passion, energy, lust, excitement, agitation

Tamas: lethargy, sleepiness, dullness

Sattva: peace, calmness, serenity

Some believe that it is right for all three to exist in everything in their natural proportions. Others believe that we should always be raising the amount of sattva, especially in ourselves. I had a professor once who espoused the idea that sattva was not its own separate guna, but was made up of the proper balance of the other two (which is a rather strange and radical idea).

In some schools of philosophy one should not eat spicy food because it is rajasic and will inflame rajas in you.

I find these three descriptors very helpful in my day to day life to explain and understand things.

Some days I feel "blah." If I acknowledge to myself that I feel "tamasic," though, it is easier for me to see it as just a process going on in the world, and not part of who I am. Tamas exists and is interacting with me in some way, but the other two are there as well and will eventually make their own appearances.

So now if you hear me talk about the gunas, you'll know what I'm referring to.

Reclaiming "Hindu"

The other day my mom was pointing out to me that if Truth is universal and One, then it doesn't matter what you call it. You can give any name you want to the divine. I think that's true. Look at Mother Theresa who saw God in every person she cared for. I read a book collected from speeches she gave and over and over again she said that she cared for the poor because when she looked at them, she saw Jesus. That's a pretty Hindu concept, seeing the divine within people. But she found it in Catholicism. Does that truth of unity belong exclusively to Hinduism? Does believing that make you a Hindu? Of course not.

However, knowing that I have a choice what I call the divine, I choose to call it Brahma and to call myself a Hindu.

That word can be a bit charged. I was reading an article in the new Hinduism Today that was about a debate between Deepak Chopra and Aseem Shukla about yoga and whether it is a Hindu practice or one that belongs to everyone. Regardless of that debate, what I found interesting in it was that Dr. Shukla called on Mr. Chopra to acknowledge his own Hindu roots and Chopra refused to. He associates the word “Hindu” with the close-minded Orthodox and calls himself an Advaita Vedantan (that is, by the way, what I used to call myself). Shukla argues for reclaiming the title Hindu and I agree with him.

Shukla writes, “Not willing to identify himself as a Hindu, Chopra is content to accept the term Sanatana Dharma as the source of the yoga and the Vedantic wisdom he propagates. Chopra is hardly the first to find it hard to openly identify himself as a Hindu, just as Eckhart Tolle eschews the term Hindu while he admittedly parlays the copious works of the towering contemporary Advaita Vedanta Hindu master, Sri Ramana Maharshi. Today, Sanatana Dharma and Hinduism are synonymous. Chopra incomprehensibly condemns Hinduism as ‘tribal’…”

In another place Shukla does acknowledge that the ancient rishis did not call themselves “Hindu,” that the term is rather recent, but it is still a useful way to describe the practices and the beliefs.

It is, after all, a word recognized by the entire world, even if grossly misunderstood. I think rather than abandon the word because it is misunderstood, it is up to us to give it its true meaning.

Instead of being afraid of the baggage of the word “Hindu”, why not remake Hinduism to be what it should be? It does not belong to the close minded, hateful, or bigoted. I won’t give the word to those who espouse violence.

Let’s live by example, embodying the good parts of Hinduism and showing the world those best parts.

I wear Indian clothes and a bindi in part to help make it normal in the west, to send the message that you don’t have to whitewash your culture to be American or British, etc. Rather than saying, I can't be religious (or I have to hide being religious) because I am young, modern, and liberal, we can go into the world and show that you can be both. I can be religious and show my religion and at the same time be sassy, modern, and liberal!

I have pride in the title of “Hindu” and I know that I am creating the definition of what that is every day when I interact with people who are not Hindus or who are put off by their memories of unyielding Hindus in their family, etc.

With pride we can say, this is what Hinduism looks like. It is not stuck in the past, it does not have to be "tribal," it is vibrant and alive and modern.

How I celebrated

I had a great time with Ganesh Chathurthi.

In the morning I went to Chinmaya and there was a Ganesh puja performed by the children.

In the afternoon I created my own Ganesha statue, then I cooked modak and offered them to the idol and then we drove to a park and I released the statue into the water.


There were a couple of hitches. My modak turned out terrible! They were falling apart and I couldn't get them into the right shape, but my friend who was visiting said to keep trying anyway. They ended up looking like wontons. The filling tasted fine, but the dough was not great. Next time I'm buying them from the grocery store.


Letting the little statue go in the water was deeply moving. It was hard for me to leave it behind there. I like the symbolism of "dust thou art to dust returnest" (which is part of a line from a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, though he goes on to write that this was not said of the soul).


You may not realize it, but this is the first year that I'm doing Hindu holidays. I've considered myself a Hindu for seven years, but all I've done before is Holi. I was never well connected in a Hindu community and I didn't know how to go about it. Now I have a temple to go to and I have my Hindi meet up group, which invites me to things. And I'm figuring out for myself how to make each holiday meaningful, and which traditions I want to