Posts Tagged ‘India’
Sufism
The central concept of Sufism is love. It was a reform movement, and believed in mysticism and preached the worship of God through devotional singing. In Sufism, music, dance, meditation and are seen as the spiritual guides in attaining unity with God. At Sufi shrines music help lift the devotees into a state of spiritual ecstasy. The 14th century Muslim mystic Hazrat Nizamudduin Auliya, IndiaÕs most revered Sufi saint, preached the values of prayer, love and unity. He told his followers that love was omnipresent and the route to the divine. The unorthodox methods of worship has divided Sufis from those following more puritanical ways of Islam. Muslims have claimed that the practices followed in Sufism were taken from Christianity and Hinduism.
Fast Food in India
From unsure and sometimes rough beginnings, American food chains are growing fast in India now. Papa John’s just entered and KFC is resurgent. McDonald’s now has 91 restaurants in India and feeds 350,000 people a day. Pizza Hut had 126 restaurants in July and is expanding fast into small towns, as is Subway, with 79 restaurants. In fact, Indian menu options have become standard for American chains here.
The Peshawari Chana Paneer Pizza, a more recent innovation, was developed by Pizza Hut India’s marketing and research team, headed by Sanjiv Mediratta. The intended consumer? Anyone craving “The Great Indian Treat.”
As with most new ideas, people scoffed at first. “When I was doing this pizza, everyone put me down and said, ‘We can’t put chickpeas on it; there is no value.’ I said, if you look at an Indian consumer, he eats bhatura, which is a bread, and he eats it with chana. My crust is also a bread. So I just need to put some chana and onion on top of it.”
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Edison’s Little India
From indoor cricket to a Hindu temple, pan shops, dosa and biryani stalls, and saris in the store windows, this eastern U.S. suburban area could be an Indian municipality.
Driving down Oak Tree Road in Edison, New Jersey, is like going through Lajpat Nagar market in New Delhi-albeit with some key differences. Chock-a-block with sari showrooms, grocery stores selling curry pata, and Bollywood music shops…even the mannequins have the same plastic hair.
This is “Little India,” and like the Chinatowns and Little Italy’s that came before it, it is the expression of an immigrant culture that is finally establishing itself in the melting pot of America. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, Edison’s population of about a 100,000 was 17.5 percent Indian American. That is the highest percentage of any municipality in the United States, and growing.
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Bhangra on U.S. College Campuses
Every spring, around the same time as the Baisakhi festival in Punjab, college students from across America gather in a historic theater a few blocks from the White House. Some hail from India, some from Pakistan, and others from New Jersey, but today they are united in a common purpose: bhangra.
You can spot them from a mile away. Wearing shocking pink and green turbans and sparkling dupattas, the girls and boys of the top U.S. university teams make quite a spectacle as they pass the gray and white stone buildings of downtown Washington, D.C. They are here to compete in George Washington University’s Bhangra Blowout, the biggest intercollegiate bhangra dance competition in America.
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American cars in India
In the late 1950s, American car companies were pushed out of India by unfriendly trade and import policies, and the passion for American cars ebbed. It lingered longer in Bollywood, where superstars like Dharmendra sang paeans to the Chevrolet Impala and every hero roared onto the screen in some gleaming steel chariot designed in Michigan. But as the decades passed, that infatuation also faded, and Indian car companies began manufacturing smaller, more efficient automotive dreams for the masses.
Today the car market is decidedly larger and American companies Ford and General Motors (GM) are back, competing with a whole new batch of global car makers. After rough beginnings in the 1990s, American car companies are serious about India, and they are seriously growing as well. Ford and GM may be cutting costs and closing plants in the United States, but the plan for India is bigger and better without an end in sight.
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Adoption in India
A few decades ago, the adoption scene in India was inactive and one-sided at best. Raising children not born in the family was considered unacceptable by most Indians, and even though some Indians wanted to adopt, most orphaned children went abroad. But 1984 brought the country’s first adoption regulations, and by 1989 a quota system was introduced that required 25 percent of all orphaned children to be adopted within India. Since then, a social revolution has taken place, and more orphaned and abandoned children have a waiting list of parents who want to take them home.
According to the Central Adoption Resource Agency (CARA) 1,707 children were adopted in India last year. (This figure does not include agencies not registered with CARA, but with state governments for domestic adoptions only. Because of the large number of such agencies, CARA estimates the actual domestic figure is two to three times as high.) In addition, 1,021 children were cleared for foreign and non-resident Indian families to adopt.
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