What Won't Aamba Do?

I don't know the answer to that question yet. What I won't do has not been discovered. Wearing a sari in my regular day life is not that thing!

Here's the photographic evidence that I did indeed wear my sari today:

I went to my therapy appointment, to work, and also to the mall and the grocery store for work errands! No big deal, I could totally do this on a regular basis :)

No one at my office batted an eye at it. They are far too prepared for my eclectic and unusual wardrobe. In the mall we passed a couple of ladies wearing full head coverings and they smiled at me. At one store the girl behind the counter told me she loved what I was wearing.

So all together it was a hit. Next year maybe my female office mates will want to join in, I wish I had thought to bring some extra saris for them to put on!

Yikes, wear your sari to work tomorrow?

http://malathi-writersblock.blogspot.com/2011/03/why-i-want-to-wear-sari-this-8th-of.html

Ms. Malathi has written this wonderful post about wearing sari and she suggests that we hold our wear a sari to work day March 8th, because apparently it is women's day...? I didn't know that!

Of course, March 8th is tomorrow!

Will I be brave enough to put on a sari for work tomorrow? (Thank goodness it isn't the day of our big presentation).

I'm going to try to do it and I'll get a picture to post here if I do!

By the way, on the subject of clothes, I saw a woman in Wal-mart yesterday wearing a beautiful, bright green and pink salwar kameez and she didn't look Indian at all. She was black, but she could have been mixed race. I didn't get up the courage to go over to her and compliment her outfit. :(

Hindu Terms

I love when I find someone who has a big problem with Hinduism using its terms. It seems that many Americans now don't know the origin of words like "karma." Below is a quote from a blog that I read occasionally. Its heavy evangelical Christian emphasis is usually too much for me, but there are some useful writing tip gems applicable outside the Christian writing market (why is there an entirely separate market just for Christian writing, anyway?)

Monday, February 28, 2011
Why Men Don't Read Romance

If you're a Christian man who reads Christian fiction, well, you're a dying breed. Call it payback for centuries of misogynist tyranny, but finally karma has caught up. Don't believe me? A stroll down the Religious Fiction aisle will cool your jets, bubba.

Novel Journey

An evangelical Christian believing in karma... hilarious.

Humor: Buddhist

A friend posted this hilarious video on Facebook. It is about Buddhism, but there is a lot of relevance to Hindus too!

Inter-religious Marriage in India

The latest Hinduism Today magazine just arrived. There are a number of interesting articles, as usual. On one of the opening pages is a tiny piece about an Indian/non-Indian couple trying to get a divorce.

It sounds like the Delhi high court is questioning whether inter-religious marriages are valid. The man in this couple is Hindu and the woman "claims" to have converted to Hinduism. The Justice said, "a bare declaration that he is a Hindu by a person born in another faith is not sufficient to convert him to Hinduism."

They are requiring documentation or some kind of proof that the woman is a Hindu. This is relevant because there are different marriage laws for Hindus and for other faiths.

I think this court case could have far-reaching effects and I worry what those will be.

Happy Maha Shivaratri

I was going back through my old posts, thinking I must have said something about this holiday a year ago, yet I can't find anything! I'm sure it's in there somewhere, but I didn't have much of an audience back then.

It's a little later this year than I was expecting, I'm used to it falling in February, but this year it is today, March 3rd.

The title of this festival means "The Great Night of Shiva."


A fast is held through the day, and an all night vigil is held with ongoing pujas.


Here is some information about it:
http://hinduism.about.com/od/festivalsholidays/p/mahashivratri.htm

http://www.mahashivratri.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maha_Shivaratri


I don't have time for a long post today, work is very busy, but I wanted to acknowledge this important day and tonight, once everything has settled down, I'll be spending some time meditating on Shiva, the central God on my altar.

Center of the Universe

It never ceases to interest me how every one of us billions of people has our own world. We can experience the same event, yet have different memories of it, different feelings about it.

We meet so many people in our lives and through one or two degrees touch so many other lives.

All of us billions and we all have an inner self. We all put ourselves in the center of the action and the world around us is like a play starring us. It's so interesting to realize that everyone does this, there are billions of different plays going on all around us.

It's interesting to find that someone who was a huge presence in my life barely remembers me.

A sting to the ego, certainly, but a valuable perspective also, that what I am thinking and experiencing, what is meaningful to me, is being experienced completely differently by the people next to me.

And then it gives me an odd feeling about the solidity of my own existence. How I see myself is so different from how anyone else sees me. Who am I if each person has a different impression of me and what I am like? I am a small player in other people's dramas, or sometimes a large player. I am different to every single person who encounters me.

Fascinating, isn't it?