Religious ritual is bad for the environment

"Hi Crappy, this is what goes on in Jamaica Bay at Frank Charles park in Howard Beach and the parking area on the south side of the Joseph Addabbo Bridge.This land is under National Park Service control and they claim they can't stop it because it's a freedom of religion issue.They dump into the water all kinds of fruits, vegetables,flowers,and food.On land they also leave behind statues,pictures and reams of cloth flags.

There is supposed to be an ecology minded group within the Hindu community that has been discouraging this practice and they say they do a cleanup once a month but I have never seen them at Charles Park. Last week I saw NPS clean the beach with a four man crew, they say they come every Sunday.

I think if NPS is going to allow this the they should clean the beach more often, nobody being on a beach with rotten fruit and it is bad for the health of the water and the animals that need a healthy environment to live." - Rich

Hindus clean up Jamaica Bay

From the Forum:

Bundled up in coats protecting them from the still-cold spring, the volunteers – young and old, from Queens and throughout the city – spread out across the beach at Jamaica Bay Sunday afternoon, picking up items scattered across the sand that, to those who left them there as religious offerings, represented beauty and prosperity and renewal. Once lovingly handled by worshipers on the South Queens coastline, colorful statues of such Hindu gods and goddesses as Vishnu, Lakshmi, and Ganesha line the sand in a less perfect form than they once were – their plastic shoulders chipped, their painted facades water-worn.

Spending a couple hours on the shore where many Hindus – especially those from nearby Richmond Hill, Ozone Park, and South Park – go to pray, the volunteers comb the beach for items that worshipers take to Jamaica Bay because it has become an adoptive Ganges River – the spot in India where the water is perceived as sacred and where people will take religious items to be blessed. But, because Jamaica Bay has become such a draw, the coastline has also become increasingly littered with religious items that were put in the water but wash back onto the shore, alarming area park workers and environmentalists who worry what the non-biodegradable goods doing to an ecosystem home to many species of wildlife.

“We like to put offerings in the water, but, when this practice began in the olden days, those offerings were biodegradable – flowers and fruits; it wasn’t the styrofoam and bottles of today,” said Sunita Viswanath, a co-founder of the all-volunteer group called Sadhana: Coalition of Progressive Hindus.

That is why Viswanath and the group’s two other co-founders, Aminta Kilawan and Rohan Narine, launched, along with the U.S. National Park Service, a monthly cleanup program, which began Sunday, at Jamaica Bay. Known as “Project Prithvi,” the initiative continues the work that others in the Hindu community have done to pick up the religious items from the shoreline. Additionally, as part of Sadhana’s work, the co-founders said they are going to different Hindu temples to speak to religious leaders and worshipers about the importance of respecting the environment – a message they said has been well received because it is so core to the beliefs of Hinduism.

“When we show community members the damaged, broken idols that we have collected at the beach, that really gets a reaction,” Viswanath said. “They stop in their tracks and say, ‘Wow, we shouldn’t be doing that.’”

Some Hindus cleaning up after themselves

From the Times Ledger:

Although Queens residents of all stripes are guilty of littering or dumping in Jamaica Bay, Hindu religious rites get some blame for some of the more visible debris. The Hindu rite of Ganga Pooja involves making an offering into a body of water as a way of cleansing one’s sins.

Unfortunately, not all of these materials used in the offerings are biodegradable. Fabric outfits, plastic idols (murthis), aluminum pans and Styrofoam wash up on the beaches and nature preserves along Rockaway’s coastline. On Aug. 31, a group of conservation-minded Hindus, in conjunction with the Rockaway Waterfront Alliance, decided to pitch in by cleaning up the Dubos Point Wildlife Sanctuary in Rockaway.

Sadhana: A Coalition of Progressive Hindus is an advocacy group based around the city that tries to advocate a socially conscious, progressive agenda, focusing on inserting tolerance, inclusiveness, non-violence (ahimsa) and faith in action (sadhana) into Hindu and interfaith discourse. As such, activities such as beach cleanups promote awareness of the moral imperative to care for the environment and promote greener practices in worship.

In response to the problem of debris at local beaches, Sadhana launched an environmental initiative known as Project Prithvi.

As Sadhana founding member Aminta Kilawan explained, Project Prithvi “aims to protect both tradition and the environment in a way that benefits society at large.”

Kilawan further noted that the Hindu notion of non-violence extends to all living things, including the environment.

Kilawan suggests that the best solution to accommodate religious communities would be to allow temples or organizations such as Sadhana to adopt a beach site, which would enable these groups to keep stewardship over that area.

Food fraud charges for senior center founder

From CBS New York:

The founder of the United Hindu Cultural Council Senior Center was arrested Monday and charged with stealing more than $50,000, allegedly by filing false invoices for lunches that were never served.

Chan Jamoona, who also serves on the Queens General Assembly and on numerous boards and leadership roles in New York City, was arrested Monday morning at her Ozone Park, Queens, home.

She was charged with grand larceny in excess of $50,000, falsifying business records, and conspiracy, 1010 WINS reported.

An investigation by the city Department of Investigation and the New York State Attorney General’s office found numerous fraudulent transactions involving Jamoona, 66, according to a news release.

Jamoona allegedly was involved in a scheme where fraudulent invoices from the senior center were sent to the city Department for the Aging for lunches that were never actually served to seniors at the center, the Attorney General’s office release said.

Also charged were Jamoona’s daughter – Veda Jamoona; and Steven Rajukumar, owner of Sonny’s Roti Shop, which provided food to the senior center, the release said.

Authorities said from 2004 until 2010, Jamoona ordered a senior center employee to make false entries on the lunch sign-in sheets, and offered to put together false invoices that would result in higher payments to the Sonny’s Roti Shop, the publication reported. Rajukumar agreed to split the payments with Jamoona, the release said.

Veda Jamoona also allegedly created false invoices as part of the scheme, the release said.

One of those arrested works for John Liu.

Mad bomber in Jamaica

From Fox 5:

Police on Monday released surveillance video of a suspect in a string of possible bias-related firebombings in Queens on New Year's Day and announced $12,000 in reward money for information leading to his arrest and conviction.

One clip shows the arsonist tossing a lit Molotov cocktail that spilled its flaming contents onto the lawn in front of a home at 88-20 170th St. that also houses a Hindu temple.

Cops say the firebug is also behind similar attacks that took place at the Al-Khoei Benevolent Foundation Islamic center, the 179th Street Deli and a home at 146-62 107th Ave.

All of the incidents took place between about 8pm and 10:15pm on Sunday.

No one was injured, but the 107th Avenue home caught fire and was badly damaged.

Nassau County police are also investigating a similar incident in which a bottle filled with gasoline was thrown at a house on Glafil Street in Elmont around 9:40pm on Sunday.

The suspect in the Queens cases was described as a black man between 25 and 30 years old, about 5 feet 8 inches and weighing 200 pounds.

When last seen, he was wearing a black jacket and baseball cap, and he fled the scene in a light-colored, four-door sedan.

Police were looking into whether the fires were hate crimes.

Fraud was all in the family

From the Daily News:

A Queens man who posed as a federal agent and boasted that he could get friends off the terror watch list has been convicted of conspiring with his wife and daughter to dupe hardworking immigrants out of nearly $2 million.

Shane Ramsundar, his wife, Gomatee, and their daughter, Shantal, each face hundreds of years in prison for conning members of Queens’ West Indian community into believing they could get them federally seized property at dirt-cheap prices.

“The jury has rightfully branded the defendants as con artists who preyed upon and unscrupulously exploited members of their own immigrant community who were in need of assistance,” said Queens District Attorney Richard Brown after the conviction late Tuesday. “The victims were betrayed by the defendants who turned their American Dream into the American nightmare.”

Ramsundar, 52, met many of the 19 victims at Hindu temples near his South Richmond Hill home, and passed himself off as a holy man, prosecutors say.

Over six years, the Ramsundars duped victims into thinking they could sell them properties in Queens and Florida seized from tax evaders and drug dealers before they went up for public auction.

Shantal Ramsundar, 23, laundered cash through her bank accounts and held her father out as a federal agent, and Gomatee Ramsundar, 47, conned victims into thinking her husband could get them green cards , prosecutors say.

No good deed goes unpunished

From the NY Times:

Some months ago, [Mr. Narine] identified his first big cause: to help unify the young members of the Indian and Indo-Caribbean diaspora in southern Queens and develop a political voice for the population. He created a plan to hold a series of events at which young Sikhs and Hindus, the two dominant religions, could “get to know each other, network.”

For the inaugural event, he decided to screen “Sita Sings the Blues,” a 2008 animated feature film that tells a story derived from Ramayana, an ancient Sanskrit epic. The film has provoked outrage among some Hindus who believe its portrayal of the Ramayana and Hinduism is offensive. But Mr. Narine, who considers himself a devout Hindu, did not think much of this. He just liked the film.

Then on Sunday, Mr. Narine began receiving e-mails and phone calls from angry Hindus criticizing his choice of film. Dozens became scores; scores became hundreds. They were coming from across the country and around the world. By Wednesday, Mr. Narine had heard from more than a thousand opponents. Most were unkind, some were even threatening. Words unprintable on this Web site were abundant.

Mr. Narine has accepted the blame for inadvertently inviting the protest: He sent the invitations to people he had thought were community leaders and allies. They had forwarded the e-mails to the Hindu groups that waged the campaign against him.

Hindu rituals threaten Jamaica Bay ecosystem

From the NY Times:

As the Hindu population has grown in Queens over the last decade, so too has the amount of ritual debris — clothing, statues, even cremation ashes — lining the banks of the bay in Gateway National Recreation Area.

But to the park rangers who patrol the beach, the holy waters are a fragile habitat, the offerings are trash and the littered shores are a federal preserve that must be kept clean for picnickers, fishermen and kayakers. Unlike the Ganges, they say, the enclosed bay does not sweep the refuse away.

The result is a standoff between two camps that regard the site as sacrosanct for very different reasons, and have spent years in a quiet tug of war between ancient traditions and modern regulations. Strenuous diplomacy on both sides has helped, but only to a point.

...as new immigrants arrive, unaware of the rules, and others refuse to change their ways, park rangers have intermittently forsaken good-cop sensitivity for bad-cop force: installing signs, closing the parking lot at night and threatening to hand out $75 fines, to little avail.

“It’s been a mounting problem for years,” said Kathy Krause, the supervisory park ranger. “The breakdown of these items is very, very harmful.”

Cremated remains are a particularly touchy subject. The scattering of ashes in water is among Hinduism’s most sacred rituals, necessary for a successful transition to the next life. The practice has drawn concern from park officials; they issue special permits for spreading ashes on a case-by-base basis, but Hindu leaders acknowledge that some bereaved families do not wait for permission.

Hindu priest was a slave

From the Times Ledger:

A Hindu priest finally got some justice Wednesday after being forced to toil for $50 a week in a Corona temple for seven years.

A jury awarded Devendra Shukla more than $2 million after finding during an eight-day trial in federal court in Brooklyn that Sat Prakash Sharma, his wife Geeta and the Vishva Seva Ashram temple were civilly liable for forced labor, involuntary servitude and human trafficking against the 34-year-old Indian immigrant, according to Shukla’s lawyer, Sanjay Chaubey. Sat Sharma is the temple’s director and president and Geeta Sharma sits on its board.

Krishnan Chittur, the Sharmas’ attorney, vehemently disagreed with the verdict, saying it “was contrary to the weight of the evidence” and that the court had provided him with a briefing schedule for proceedings to have the verdict overturned on appeal.

Before Shukla came to America, he was told he would be paid $500 per week and receive free room and board for working as a priest at the temple, located at 104-38 Corona Ave., but when he arrived, he was forced to live in a tiny, cell-like room, and his employers paid him only $50 per week, for a total of $21,000 in seven years, Chaubey said.

He was forced to work days as long as 18 hours, doing all matter of tasks including ministering, construction work, janitorial duties and more, and the Sharmas used fear tactics to ensure he did not go to authorities or flee his situation, according to Chaubey.

Shukla was awarded about $2.8 million by the jury but the amount was lowered by $500,000 because Shukla may have improperly discussed certain details of the case with journalists, according to Chaubey.

Chittur contended that much of the evidence that Chaubey introduced was “fabricated” and that Shukla was free to move about, was paid the full $500 per week, lived in a nice basement room, was running businesses via laptop and that witnesses countered many of his grievances.