GO TO SOURCE SABARIMALA, KERALA, INDIA, January 14, 2002: The Travancore Devaswom Board, which administers the hill shrine of Ayyappa at Sabarimala, will offer food free of cost to all devotees arriving for darshan from the next Mandalam-Makaravilakku season onwards, board president N. Babu said here on Monday. He said an estimated 21,700,000 devotees, mostly from Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and…
Source: The Hindu HYDERABAD, INDIA, January 12, 2002: As Afghanistan continues to be in spotlight, an eminent scholar of ancient Indian astronomy, B. G. Sidharth, Director-General of the B. M. Birla Planetarium and Science Centre, has contended that there is sufficient astronomical and other evidence to suggest that the battle and many of the events of the Mahabharata took place…
GO TO SOURCE JAMMU, INDIA, January 2, 2002: Despite falling temperatures at the holy cave shrine, over 123,000 lakh pilgrims from the Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and other parts of India visited the abode dedicated to Mata Vaishno Devi during the last week of December 2001. On December 31 alone, around 33,000 pilgrims paid their respects to…
Source: The Hindu KERALA, INDIA, January 2, 2002: Tamil minority Brahmins in the state recently organized a march and protest against the State Government’s Malabar Hindu Religions and Charitable Institutions and Endowments Bill, 2001. Hundreds of women and even the elderly who normally do not leave their homes, walked down the main streets of Palakkad town. Belonging primarily to an…
GO TO SOURCE BANGALORE, INDIA, Jan 11, 2002: Bangalore, India’s high-tech capital and one of the world’s leading technology hubs, tops the nation in the number of suicides. A team of researchers headed by Dr. G. Gururaj and Dr. Mohan Isaac from the Bangalore-based National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences found that the city’s suicide rate is 35…
GO TO SOURCE WASHINGTON, USA, January 12, 2001: Four Buddhist monks, exiled from Tibet by Chinese rule, belonging to a 20-man team from a branch in Atlanta of their monastery, began to lay out a seven-foot work of symbolic art in 20 colors of sand a “healing mandala” for the pain of the attack on the Pentagon. “For at least…
GO TO SOURCE GANGA SAGAR, INDIA, January 13, 2002: Security precautions are unprecedented here where the Ganga River enters the Bay of Bengal during the annual Ganga Sagar festival. Already 50,000 pilgrims have arrived and hundreds of thousands more are expected for the main bathing day on the January 14. The state government has requested help from the nation’s Coast…
GO TO SOURCE UTTAR PRADESH, INDIA, January 12, 2001: The Uttaranchal police on Tuesday claimed to have busted an international smuggling racket by arresting two persons and recovering a 500-year-old icon of the Jain saint, Lord Mahavir, from them. The duo, members of a gang, were arrested with the 2.75 kg icon, made of ashta dhatu (an alloy of eight…
GO TO SOURCE LONDON, ENGLAND, January 12, 2002: London yogis, according to this report, are concerned that nontraditional forms of yoga developed in America may be harmful to some people. Jill Boag-Munroe of the UK’s governing body of yoga, the British Wheel, has studied and taught yoga for 20 years. “I’ve heard and read of American variations, which use machines…
Source: Religion News Service UTTAR PRADESH, INDIA, January 9, 2002: A Hindu militant accused of killing an Australian missionary and his two young sons said today he might be a candidate for the Indian parliament from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Dara Singh is one of 17 men accused of setting fire to a jeep in which missionary Graham…