STROUDSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA, November 19, 2018 (The Inquirer): Every day, a joyful man in dung-covered boots tries to balance the world’s karma by dishing out love, compassion, and the occasional fried Indian delight to his ragtag herd of cows. The mighty Krishna, a tall and hefty Angus, appears to be a favorite, but Sastri said each of his 23 cows is equally beloved at his Poconos sanctuary. Sastri, 78, is wiry, bespectacled, and constantly smiling, and wears a blazer over his farm clothes while he walks around his 90-acre Lakshmi Cow Sanctuary in Monroe County. Sastri still resembles a college professor, albeit one who fell in mud. He grew up in Chidambaram, by the Bay of Bengal in Southern India, moved to the United States in 1964 for grad school, and spent 28 years teaching engineering at New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn.
As the millennium approached, however, Sastri, a devout Hindu, began to ponder his next life and wonder if he’d done enough good deeds. He wasn’t just thinking about a life after retirement. ”The Hindu philosophy says whatever karma you have done in the past, in this life, follows you,” he explained. Sastri decided in 2000 that saving cows was his way forward and traded a Brooklyn brownstone and academic life for pickup trucks on life support and a farm in Northampton County, and eventually a 90-acre spread in Jackson Township, Monroe County, with a ramshackle farmhouse. The goal of the Lakshmi Cow Sanctuary, a nonprofit, is to save cows destined for the slaughterhouse, but Sastri has also taken in animals other kindhearted people had kept as pets. ”If you look at all the living beings in this world, the most loving and compassionate animal is the cow,” Sastri said. ”They give and give and give.”
CALIFORNIA, U.S., March 18, 2018 (DCF USA): After sustained engagement with the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity (OEOD), the University of California has issued a letter to Dharma Civilization Foundation, expressing both regret for any misunderstanding as well as continued interest in working with the Hindu community to establish Chairs at UCI. The letter begins:
”t the current moment, the process initiated by DCF with UCI, from 2012 onwards has successfully resulted in the creation of the Jain and Sikh Chairs at UCI, whereas the Hindu Chairs stand rejected, even today. In December 2015, certain UCI Faculty from the School of Humanities initiated a petition, calling into question the Hindu communities’ motives, and engaged in an orchestrated campaign of slander designed to delegitimize both Dharma Civilization Foundation, and Dean Georges Van Dan Abbeele, and in the process, ensured that the efforts of gift giving by the Hindu Community to the UCI were shut down without any semblance of constructive dialog or engagement. The overwhelming message that the Faculty members behind the public petitions, and highly prejudicial open letter delivered is that the Hindus alone are not welcome to participate at the academic table. Ironically, they did so, in the name of academic freedom, while not advancing the cause of civil discourse. DCF welcomes the letter from UCI, and the opportunity for constructive, professional and meaningful engagement with UCI Administration, Faculty and Students that it seems to invite.
The full text of the letter can be read at ”source” above.
A happy man is he who desires nothing, claims nothing, expects nothing and is free from hatred and fear.
— Dada Vaswani, leader of the Sadhu Vaswani Mission
