My parents are deeply pious Hindus.
I don't believe there's anything in life you can't go back and fix. The ancient Vedas - the oldest Hindu philosophy - and modern science agree that time is an illusion. If that's true, there's no such thing as a past or a future - it's all one huge now. So what you fix now affects the past and the future.
Not just Christians and Jews, but also Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and the followers of many other religions believe in values like peace, respect, tolerance and dignity. These are values that bring people together and enable us to build responsible and solid communities.
The Asiatics and the Africans, such as the Russians, the Arabs, the Hindus, are increasing with marked rapidity. Never have the European races been in such great peril as today.
A symbol in Chinese Buddhism is the lotus plant, which regenerates every year, symbolizing life, renewal, and the Buddha himself. Actually it is used in many Asian religions including Hinduism. Few people think of it as food even though it is used as an ingredient all the time.
People's identities as Indians, as Asians, or as members of the human race, seemed to give way - quite suddenly - to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh communities.
I grew up in India during the 1960s and '70s in a meat-eating Hindu family. Only my mother and my grandparents were vegetarians. The rest of us enjoyed eating - on special occasions - chicken or fish or mutton.
When we were getting married the Hindu way in Arrah, we had an old guest who asked my wife what her 'good name' was. I think she'd heard that I had married a Muslim. When my wife said, 'Mona Ahmed Ali,' the lady looked at me and exclaimed, 'Oh, so you've married a terrorist.'
People value Halloween, like Valentine's Day, because they can tell themselves that it's not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.
I am a Hindu, brought up mostly in India.
