by Kollengode S. Venkataraman, Written in October 2004 It is hard for me to realize that The Pittsburgh Patrika is entering its 10th year. And it is going strong. In a city which has churches over 200 years old, companies making profits for over 100 years, and with The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the oldest [ ]
By Kollengode S Venkataraman Written in 2003 Throughout its unrecorded and recorded history, India has given a long lineage of teachers who injected refreshing ideas whenever society got bogged down in excesses in rituals and dogma. History bears this out even though many among us axiomatically believe in the opposite. The Upanishad teachers broke away [ ]
By Kollengode S Venkataraman Written 2003 When Bill Gates of Microsoft, the software behemoth, was in India European heads of state don t get. Only the other Bill Bill Clinton in November on a four-day trip, he got media coverage that even many seemed to have received more coverage in Indian media. Look at [ ]
By Kollengode S Venkataraman (October 30, 2001) Living our busy lives, we want to reduce complex issues to a manageable size. The media condenses this for us into blurbs, 15-or 30-second news segments, or neat 12 x3 bumper stickers, whether it is issues relating to abortion, fetal tissues, nuclear umbrella, WTO, or terrorism. That we set [ ]
By Kollengode S Venkataraman, written in 2001 The darker side of economic boom times in the US — the 18th century California Gold Rush, and the growth of the steel industry in Western Pennsylvania, for example — is well documented in US history. If we do not know about similar stories in countries like India, [ ]
By Premlata Venkataraman, Written October 2001 Note: Premlata has volunteered at the S. V. Temple for many activities, including talking to visitors from schools, universities, and churches about Hinduism and the temple. The Hindu religion is at least 4000 years old, and many of its famous temples, both in India and outside, date back 1500 [ ]
By Kollengode S Venkataraman, Written in July 2001 It is that time of the year again, when many of our young, bright, and charming women will have their debut in Indian classical dances in Pittsburgh in Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi for now. In the years ahead, Odissi and Kathak too would be part of this rite-of-passage [ ]
By Kollengode S Venkataraman Written in 2010 There is an axiomatic belief bordering on dogma among conservative Republicans and Libertarians that less governing is better governing, and that a Free Market system is self-correcting. But the free market has never been free. After all, elected officials pass laws creating the environment in which the supposedly [ ]
By Kollengode S Venkataraman Written in 2000 Sometime back (January 12, 2000) the Times of India published a translation of one of Guru Nanak s verses: Let mind be the peasant that does the farmingHard work be the water; the body, the field.Let His name be the seed and contentment the cover.You must don the dress [ ]
By Kollengode S Venkataraman Written October 2000 The large compendium of early Bhakti poetry in Tamil composed between 6th and 10th centuries by the four Saivite and the twelve Vaishnavite savants is well known to the initiated. But another large body of Tamil literature, generically called the Sangam Literature, predates even this. This corpus of [ ]
By Kollengode S. Venkataraman, written in 1998 Economists, sociologists, and politicians of all stripes have recognized that in the US the gap between the rich and the poor has widened considerably in the last two decades in both income and wealth (See Economic Trends in Business Week, p. 32 Aug. 27, 97). In this background [ ]
By Kollengode S Venkataraman Written in January 1997 In the wake of the last issue, we received an anonymous letter that faulted your magazine on several things. We thank the writer – we refer to him/her as Mr./Ms. Anamik(a) now on we for his/her interest in the magazine and taking time for writing the long [ ]
By Kollengode S Venkataraman, Written in 2001 Nowhere in the world does one find as much diversity in restaurants a in the US. New immigrants continue to add their own unique culinary flavor to whet the appetite of US restaurant goers. Even in Pittsburgh, not a touristy city in the US, we have all varieties [ ]
By Kollengode S. Venkataraman Written in 2000 Recently, I received an e-mail chain letter that asked me to send it to others (asking them, in turn, to send to others), and promised good luck in return. The familiar words took me back to my college days Way back in the century, when I [ ]
By Kollengode S. Venkataraman, written in 2000 In the last issue, Amitabh Dubey wondered about the incongruity of India developing chess, a game in which exercise of free will is central, and Indians widespread belief in fate. Fate, luck, or Gods will, when reduced to their abstraction, describe the unpredictability of events unfolding in our [ ]
Kollengode S Venkataraman (Written in October 1999) In the checkered history of post-colonial South Asia, instances of missed opportunities having disastrous consequences are countless. But nothing comes anywhere close to the way Pakistan squandered the global goodwill it had after the Lahore summit last February between its prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his Indian counterpart [ ]
Kollengode S Venkataraman October 1999 As teenagers decades ago, we grandchildren sat around our family. A matriarch snacking on jackfruit and banana chips during a warm, sultry summer full moon night in a Kerala village. She was telling us how the Mahabharata war ended: As the war progressed in Kurukshetra, Arjuna killed Karna, his own [ ]
Kollengode S. Venkataraman Written in 1998 Last year end, December 8 to be exact, I was stuck for several hours in one of the cavernous concourses of Atlanta airport after missing my flight. You can kill only so much time reading papers. So, I watched the CNN Airport News disjointed bits of information telecast with [ ]
By Kollengode S Venkataraman, written in 1997 Comparing the education levels of entrepreneurs and the population in the US is quite revealing. See the table below. Among entrepreneurs, only 3% have not completed high school, while 20% of the general population has not completed high school. Without even a high school diploma it is tough [ ]
Kollengode S Venkataraman, Written in 1996 Things we do not allow a seven-year-old to do on legal, moral, or ethical grounds, or out of simple old-fashioned common sense: Driving cars or motorcycles, drinking alcoholic beverages, handling power tools, smoking cigarettes, staying home by themselves, taking free-fall rides in amusement parks, handling open flames or corrosive [ ]