Religious Hindu man takes community god offerings

Elderly man says with great joy that he has been at the temple helping his neighbors honor Hindu gods for “too many years.”

“She’s beautiful.” That’s what everyone says when I show them this photo. She is beautiful. But what you can’t tell — unless you look really closely at the stains on her dress or at the makeshift structure in the background — is that she’s a child of the slums, the poorest sector of Indian society.

Ashis Nandy, receiving the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2007. (Mohan Trivedi/Wikimedia Commons)

The diverse crowd gathered to hear Indian scholar Ashis Nandy at USC all seemed to ask the same question, posed in different ways: How can we make people get along?

This is the big year 10 for the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles, a small but growing five-day exhibition that takes places at the ArcLight every April. Shipra Gupta, operations coordinator for the festival, spoke to me about its significance.

Immediately after Kamna Mittal and her husband were married in their hometown of Delhi in 2000, they were off to the United States, where they settled in the Bay Area. In addition to being in a new city, the couple was new to each other. Their marriage had been arranged.

Deities surround the diamonds and gold at Raj Jewels in Artesia, but few customers are interested in religious jewelry, according to owner Ravi Pattni. "The new generation want some new, different," he says. His biggest challenge as a jeweler is coming up with new creative designs to cater to his customers.

When I visit the Guru Das Ram Ashram for its Sunday prayer services the marble floors and walls that are temporarily covered by a white sheet.  The ashram is a Sikh Gurdwara, a house of prayer and community, and the white sheet is where you sit during prayer services after taking one’s shoes off outside. 

Indian marriage

Neeta Patel grew up in what she characterizes as a “hybrid culture.”