REYIS OF SUNSHINE

I love temple elephants. They are the most endearing spiritual animals I’ve ever come into contact with. They seem to KNOW what you’re thinking, and they can bless you by hitting you on the head gently. :) 

slabbb-blockkk-hilarious:

The Australian Aborigines speak of jiva or guruwari, a seed power deposited in the earth. In the Aboriginal world view, every meaningful activity, event, or life process that occurs at a particular place leaves behind a vibrational residue in the earth, as plants leave an image of themselves as seeds. The shape of the land - its mountains, rocks, riverbeds, and water holes - and its unseen vibrations echo the events that brought that place into creation. Everything in the natural world is a symbolic footprint of the metaphysical beings whose actions created our world. As with a seed, the potency of an earthly location is wedded to the memory of its origin.

The Aborigines called this potency the “Dreaming” of a place, and this Dreaming constitutes the sacredness of the earth. Only in extraordinary states of consciousness can one be aware of, or attuned to, the inner dreaming of the Earth.

JIVA?! GURUWARI?! WE ARE (South Asians/Aborigines) ALL THE SAME! 

sorry, got a lil excited. this is awesome and soooo true. these things are all one—this world we live in is all an illusion. the only pervading truth is Brahman, the unyielding infinite. :]

indian-food:

Dahi Puri

MMMMMMMMMMM<3

peopleofthesouth:

MANY LIVES: 150 years of being Indian in South Africa

This book, spanning the 150 years since the arrival of the first Indian indentured labourers in Natal, illustrates the power of photographs. Its lens is wide as it captures the social, the economic, the political, and the religious. It invites readers to see beyond images to the human experience in the photographs.

While the focus is broad, this collection of over 700 photographs does not ignore life’s minutiae. The strength of the book lies in the interweaving of big events with the everyday as the photographs are brought to life with well researched vignettes that provide context and meaning. As it explores the many lives of Indian South Africans, this collection challenges the partitioning of identity, while acknowledging its pull and protective presence.

The story is a beguiling one that will provoke feelings of nostalgia, dissonance and intrigue, anger and hilarity, as the pages peel back history to reveal stories of passion and pain, the ordinary and the courageous.

‘MANY LIVES: 150 years of being Indian in South Africa’ is a book by Goolam Vahed, Ashwin Desai and Thembisa Waetjen. It is published by Shuter (2010).

HERMES launching a SARI line!!! sooooo beautiful. want, but shant ever have :/ 

superamit:

Two weeks ago I got a call from my doctor, who I’d gone to see the day before because I’d been feeling worn out and was losing weight, and wasn’t sure why.

He was brief: “Amit, you’ve got Acute Leukemia. You need to enter treatment right away.”

I was terrified. I packed a backpack full of clothes, went to the hospital as he’d instructed, and had transfusions through the night to allow me to take a flight home at 7am the next day. I Googled acute leukemia as I lay in my hospital bed, learning that if it hadn’t been caught, I’d have died within weeks.

—

I have a couple more months of chemo to go, then the next step is a bone marrow transplant. As Jay and Tony describe below, minorities are severely underrepresented in the bone marrow pool, and I need help.

A few ways to help:

1. If you’re South Asian, get a free test by mail. You rub your cheeks with a cotton swab and mail it back. It’s easy.
2. If you’re in NYC, you can go to this event my friends are putting on.
3. If you know any South Asians (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, or Sri Lanka), please point ‘em to the links above.

*UPDATE 1* Organize a donor drive near you (the most helpful thing you could possibly do!) email 100kcheeks@gmail.com. They’ll send you kits, flyers, tell you what to say, and make the whole process easy cheesy.

*UPDATE 2* Want to get a free test, but not in the US. Here’s a list of international donor registries that are globally searchable.

jayparkinsonmd:

My friend Amit Gupta founded my favorite photography site Photojojo. A few weeks ago, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Amit is one of the nicest, most genuine, most creative people you could ever meet. Prior to founding the awesome Photojojo, he also co-founded Jelly in 2006 in NYC, a coworking community, that’s now spread to 60 cities across the world and helped spark the coworking revolution. It looks like Amit will need a bone marrow transplant quite soon. We can help him with that.

tony b:

Unlike blood transfusions, finding a genetic match for bone marrow that his body will accept is no easy task. The national bone marrow registry has 9.5 million records on file, yet the chances of someone from South Asian descent of finding a match are only 1 in 20,000.

This is where we come in. We’re going to destroy those odds.

How? By finding and registering as many people of South Asian descent as we possibly can.

Tests are easy– a simple swab of the cheek. If you’re a match, the donation involves an outpatient procedure. It’s not fun, but it’s not dangerous either. And doing it could save a life.

We are encouraging anyone of South Asian descent to take a test to see if you’re a match. 

You can get a free test by mail, or, if you’re in New York, you can join us Friday, October 14th for a special party to rally support.

We’ll have test kits on hand at the party, as well as music, booze, and maybe even a photo booth. It will, for the first time, combine a House 2.0-style party with a New Work City-style party, and if you’ve ever been to either, you know they are always something special.

Please spread the word and please do everything you can to help Amit beat leukemia. He’s a superstar.

Much thanks to Tony and pals for organizing this event, and EVERYONE who’s been tweeting and reblogging.

Please help get the word out any way you can. My life quite literally depends on it.

USC!!! APASS DESI PROJECT   & APASS PULE are going to be running a Bone Marrow Drive & Information Booth for Amit Gupta, depicted above, as well as Barbara Fine Adams, a Tongan who is also looking for a match. We’ll be on Trousdale in the upcoming weeks! so stay tuned for flyers and more information :) 

Update: The best thing you can do is get anyone you know of South Asian descent to take a very simple, free, painless test and spread the word to their friends. You can take the test at our party on October 14th or register online to receive a kit! There is a cost associated with each test, but the person taking the test is not required to pay it. We are, however, trying to raise as much money as we can to support the test costs. Send any dollar amount to 4amit@nwc.co on Paypal to help!

life:

Heartbreak in Afghanistan — Marwah, a child suffering from severe malnutrition, is held by his mother at a hospital in Kabul. More than six percent of Afghan children under the age of five suffer from acute malnutrition, according to a recent study.

See more from our Photos of the Week.

:((((((((

indian-food:

Aloo Papri Chaat

laughingsquid:

9/11 Memorial: Reflect

JOIN US  FOR OUR PUBLIC EDUCATIONAL DISPLAY AS WELL AS OUR SCREENING AND PANEL DISCUSSION! :]

edwardspoonhands:

I learned two things today:

1. Nerdfighters are not afraid to tell me when I screw up
2. I am a bit of a psychopath.

So let’s start with number one. This is really exciting for me actually, though I feel like a jerk. There is an overwhelming feeling concerning my treatment of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 that I was too flippant, too silly, and did a disservice to the memory of the people who died that day.

On any given vlogbrothers video, comments are overwhelmingly positive. So positive, in fact, that it can make a guy feel like maybe that the people watching the videos don’t actually like the video, they’re just being really nice because they like HIM.

But here we have proof to the contrary. There aren’t very many people defending my position, so we can assume that, on other vlogbrothers videos, people actually really do like what I’m doing and saying. This is great news.

Thank you so much to nerdfighteria for keeping the dialog alive and interesting and civil, and for pointing out when I’m a dickhead.

Now onto point 2: I’m a a bit of a psychopath.

I wanted to say a couple of things in my video about our world ten years after September 11th 2001. I wanted to make a point about people talking about “winning” the war on terror and how full of shit they are.

And I wanted to make a point about how we imagine ourselves to be much more vulnerable to terrorists than we actually are.

And then I wanted to move on. I did not want to talk about how horrible that day was. I did not want to reflect upon our shared psychological scar. I did not want to spend more time pretending that I was “honoring” the dead when really all I was doing was being afraid for myself, putting myself in their place and feeling some shadow of their fear…because none of us need more fear in our lives.

I just wanted to say a couple of things from a few steps back from the situation. I thought maybe we were ready for that. And maybe we are…but probably the actual anniversary of the event was NOT THE TIME.

I’m an intensely rational person. I often do not feel emotions the same way that people around me do. I try to be careful and to recognize when people are going to be more sensitive to a topic than I am but this was a situation where I did not foresee the disparity.

I should have kept my distance, there were some phrases that were improperly worded and, most of all, I probably should have saved it for a day that wasn’t the ten year anniversary.

MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES: 

Also, there are ways that most people do not envision 9/11 permeating a community. The South Asian diaspora here in the United States faced such a dichotomy of us vs. them when there are only facets of us, it’s unreal. there were 645 LOGGED incidents in the week after 9/11 upon South Asians and Muslim Americans thought to be terrorists, but in reality were normal Americans going about their daily lives. CHILDREN who are Sikh and wear turbans had them pulled off of them, and kindly old men walking in a safe neighborhood were killed because of ignorance. 

There are multiple views upon 9/11 and it behooves you to look further than the surface. Lots of people and communities were affected by this day, and not just the obvious. The pervasiveness of Islamophobia and xenophobia is so strong that 9/11 took any existent turmoil and turned it against the South Asian community.