UNITED STATES, June 15, 2015 (by Dharma Civilisation Foundation, by Vamsee Juluri):The American Hindu community has to make some vital decisions soon on what it holds important, if not sacred, for its children and grandchildren. There is at the moment a fundamental challenge to the existential validity of Hinduism that many Hindus have not fully comprehended. Surrounded as we are by the trappings of our own seeming success as a community in America, proud of our culture and temples, we don’t quite grasp that we have left ourselves incredibly vulnerable to a problem that can easily erase whatever we cherish in two generations.
There are some academicians who understand and sympathize with the everyday Hindu practitioners’ views, but they do not have the support they need from the community as of now to help change the old and flawed mindsets among many of their colleagues. Despite its many achievements, the Hindu American community has been dismally poor in engaging academia. We have many successful academicians from our community no doubt, but most of them are not in positions to change the current discourse about Hinduism or about India. A professor of engineering, medicine, or management who happens to be Hindu will not be called on CNN or CSpan to counter those “experts” who insist that Hinduism is responsible for rapes and violence in India. Neither can our temple priests step up to this role. Contrast this situation with that of other major religious communities in the US: usually an expert on a religion steps up to offer positive, or at least sympathetic views of that religion, when it is under fire for real or perceived ills. We are perhaps the only major community that does not have that simple privilege.
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