WALDEN, NEW YORK, June 17, 2019 (Vertical Response): Students and young professionals from the tri-state area and as far as Washington, D.C., Boston and Chicago, came to attend Hindu Students Council (HSC)’s annual camp during the Memorial Day weekend at Shanti Mandir, in Walden, NY. Now in its 29th year, the camp helps young Hindus form a community and learn more about their heritage and culture from experts and from each other. This year’s camp was framed around the theme “How to Be a Woke Hindu.” “In a nutshell, ‘Being a Woke Hindu’ means understanding both the issues that face the American Hindu community, along with the issues that face the global community, and how we, as young Hindus, can use the teachings of Hindu Dharma to help make a change for the positive,” explained HSC’s President Parth Parihar. “Part of the problem our community faces is that we lack young, confident ambassadors. HSC is changing that.”
The camp sessions kicked off with a talk by Shanti Mandir’s resident-acharya Vivek Desai on Upanishadic wisdom and its relevance to our own lives. Accompanying this were a series of five Tedx-style “lightning talks” given by HSC leaders, each on a core topic–key scriptures, karma, dharma, Hindu symbols, and yoga–that Hindus should know about and be able to articulate to others. Thus, much of Saturday focused on conveying Hindu dharma’s core teachings and basic philosophies to attendees so that they could inspire further exploration and changes in their own lives. The camp sessions also empowered attendees to communicate these fundamentals to others. Debopriyo Biswas, a graduating senior from Princeton University and hailing from Bangladesh said, “camp helped me understand aspects of Hindu Dharma on a deep level and how to communicate that with people who are either interested in learning or have misconceptions about my tradition.”
More on the camp at “source” above.