Parvati Dasi, who just turned twelve years old, gives a warm and genuine smile as she hands an old lady an invitation to Festival of India in the town of Rewal, Poland. On the beach beside her, sixty devotees carrying flags, umbrellas and festoons sing the Hare Krishna mantra with the waves of the Baltic sea rippling around their feet.

The New York Times has a great thing going. I mean besides being one of the most influential news sources in the world. They have this great feature where two of their regular columnists debate a topic. It’s called The Conversation, and recently Gail Collins and Ross Douthat debated cruelty to animals in discussing the case of fallen American football icon Michael Vick, who recently completed an eighteen month stint in federal prison for involvement in a dog fighting ring.

Here are three different recipes for eggless mayonnaise, lifted from my first cookbook 'Great Vegetarian Dishes'.

The first recipe uses condensed milk as the base and is a sweet mayonnaise. The second recipe calls for evaporated milk, and the third is a dairy-free variety featuring pureed tofu.

Americans change religious affiliation early and often. In total, about half of American adults have changed religious affiliation at least once during their lives. Most people who change their religion leave their childhood faith before age 24, and many of those who change religion do so more than once. These are among the key findings of a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life. The survey documents the fluidity of religious affiliation in the U.S. and describes in detail the patterns and reasons for change.

Tarrytown, N.Y. - If the hardship of growing vegetables and fruits in the Northeast has made anything clear, it’s that the list of what can go wrong in the field is a very long one.

We wait all year for warmer weather and longer days. Once we get them, it seems new problems for farmers rise to the surface every week: overnight temperatures plunging close to freezing, early disease, aphid attacks. Another day, another problem.

Pune, India this year. With over 5,000 devotees attending from India and abroad, festivities stretching over four days, and a host of special guests including Radhanatha Swami, Chandramauli Swami, Bhakti Visrambha Madhava Swami and Bhakti Charu Swami, it was a big festival for the city.

But most exciting for many devotees was the rumored fifth special guest – Jayapataka Swami.

You don’t have to read Stillson Judah’s 1974 study, “Hare Krishna and the Counter Culture,” cover to cover to have some idea of the place in American society occupied by the Hare Krishnas in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Hare Krishna Movement was then self-promoted as, “The Positive Alternative.” An alternative to the drug culture prominent among the young, yes, and perhaps an even more far out alternative to the mainstream world of their parents.

As of late, in the year 2007, the idea of whether Lord Rama exists or not has been called into question, by no less than some of the politicians in India. So it is a wonder how such persons can be accepted as leaders of the people of India who should be concerned with preserving and protecting the culture of the country.

Star Trek, the franchise that never dies, has, like the vampire, returned among us, this time in a clever “prequel” to the original ’60s space opera TV series. In this, the eleventh of the series-spawned feature films, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the other starship Enterprise voyagers appear as “sexy young cadets,” as David Hajdu describes them in his illuminating op-ed piece on the “Star Trek” phenomenon in last Sunday’s Times.

Mathura, Oct.18 (ANI): Hundreds of religious-minded people from different parts of the country arrived in Mathura town of Uttar Pradesh on the occasion of annual Govardhan Puja which was celebrated here on Sunday.

Celebrated on the following day of Diwali, the festival of lights, Govardhan Puja holds its own significance among Hindus.

On Saturday, July 25, 2009; ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) Berkeley Hare Krishna Temple celebrated Ratha Yatra (Festival of Chariots) in the Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. ISKCON of Silicon Valley (ISV) located in San Jose collaborated in the celebration.

The Ratha Yatra with three chariots of Lord Jagannatha, Lady Subhadra, and Lord Baladeva respectively started in the afternoon from Transverse and JFK Drive. The colorful chariots were gloriously decorated.

Dr. Harvey Cox, a renowned scholar and an avid supporter of ISKCON, retired from his post as Harvard Divinity School’s Hollis Professor of Divinity this past June

Calgary's Hindus celebrated the most famous of India's festivals, the Rath Yatra Festival or Festival of Chariots, on Sept. 6. Celebrated for hundreds of years in India, it one of the oldest celebrations in the world. Millions of people arrive every year to Jagannath Puri, in eastern India, to pull the chariot on which the idols of Lord Jagannath, his brother Balabhadra and his sister Subhadra are seated.

Like traffic laws, moral principles promote order, specifically orderly social interactions. But modern education doesn’t teach us about the goal of social transactions or the goal of life itself.

Self-righteousness is easy. Self-examination is a lot harder. Understanding the difference between the two makes a tremendous change in one’s ability to communicate his or her message to another person.

Astottara-sata Dasa (Alexander Petroff) is an American second generation devotee of Krishna who spent his childhood at the rural ISKCON farm community, Gita-nagari nestled in the beautiful countryside of Port Royal, Pennsylvania, USA.

These days Astottara-sata, son of Hare Krsna Dasi, spends a lot of his time in the Democratic Republic of Congo where he is the founder and President of Working Villages International (WVI). Working Villages International is a non-profit organization dedicated to building self-sufficient, environmentally sustainable villages.

"Krishna has saved me" said Avadhuta-priya devi dasi, a devotee of Lord Krishna, referring to her incredible escape from a series of terrorist bomb blasts that tore through crowded shopping areas of Jaipur, the capital city of Rajasthan in India's north.

It is December of 1936. Abhaya Caraṇāravinda Dāsa, a forty-year-old pharmaceutical distributor then in Bombay on business, feels a sudden impulse to write a letter to his spiritual master, Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura.

It is December 9, 1968, thirty-two years later. The same disciple—now a renunciant and spiritual master himself—finds himself in the city of Los Angeles where he relates to a gathering of his own disciples the story of his 1936 letter. He is observing with them the “Disappearance Day” of his spiritual master.

The following statement was issued in response to a proposal submitted earlier by Madhu Pandit Dasa. For an explanation of the background and underlying issues it discusses, please read Bangalore Splinter Group Proposes Truce, GBC Responds.