Archives: 3
Gudi Padwa Puja Palam Vihar, Gurgaon (India)
Gudi Padwa Puja, Palam Vihar, Gurgaon (India), 13 April 2002. (Hindi) [Translation from Hindi to English] The festival of Gudi Padwa that we are celebrating today,is also celebrated in other parts of India, even in the South. Everywhere this festival is celebrated. The ‘Samvat’ calendar year that was started (By King Vikramaditya) and the calendar year started by Shalivahanas, both start on the same day. That day is today. All over the country this day (New Year) is celebrated. All the important dates in the year are fixed on that basis especially the festivals. We people (Indians) follow the lunar calendar whereas the westerners follow the sun calendar. That’s why their festival dates do not change. Here (in India ) every festival is based on the position of the moon. And that’s why the dates keep changing and the same festival falls on different dates, in different years. The reason why we give importance to the moon and keep all our dates according to its position, is that the moon has an influence on human beings. The sun does not. Along with the moon, other planets also have influence on us. That is why we follow the lunar calendar and fix our festivals accordingly. There is one festival however, where the date is as per position of the sun. When the sun starts its movement from southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere, that date is celebrated as a festival (Sankranti). In our country the science of astrology is also based Read More …
Holi Celebrations Palam Vihar, Gurgaon (India)
Holi Celebrations, Palam Vihar, Gurgaon, Delhi, India, 29 March 2002. (translated from hindi) Holi was started during the time of Shri Krishna. Before Him in the time of Shri Rama …. He was very austere. Because of that the society became very peaceful but people were devoid of all joy. So He thought that there should be a way by which people should be able to laugh freely and be joyful. And like it happens to all such ventures it happened in the case of Holi also that it produced an opposite effect. They started playing Holi in a very wrong way. It brought a very bad name to this festival. And it deteriorated to such an extent that I said, I will never play Holi now. The story of how it started is like this. There was a demo ness called Holika. She was the sister of Prahlad and Prahlad’s father used to trouble him a lot. Holika had a boon that she would not be burnt by the fire. Prahlad’s father wanted to kill him and told Holika to take the child (Prahlad) and sit on the burning pyre thinking that she would not die. But it is surprising that she died and Prahlad was not hurt in the fire and came out of it unscathed. This is a very big happening which demonstrated that it is very wrong to be cruel and aggressive. She had the boon but still she got burnt. That’s why we have this Read More …