Valentine's Day and interfaith couples

Valentine's day is a celebration of love,  and many of them choose to get married on that day as well as the New Years day.

Pictures of Interfaith  couples followed by the positive side of the story and links to a few good romantic songs at - An album of interfaith couples will be set with your pictures of those couples who did not convert the one or the other. to their religious tradition. More about it at:  http://interfaithmarriages.blogspot.com/2015/02/future-of-valentines-day.html

Interfaith Couples who did not change their religion.

There are many examples of interfaith marriages dating back to 7th Century, however, in India,  King Akbar set the tone for interfaith relations some 450 years ago. He married a Hindu princess and  both remained in their faith, and each had learned to respect the otherness of others. 

List of famous Interfaith Couples in India

You'll be surprised by the number of couples in India. 

http://foundationforpluralism.blogspot.com/2015/02/famous-interfaith-couples-of-india.html

King Akbar Married Jodabai - they remained Muslim and Hindu

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If you are an interfaith couple and would like to share a picture, I will create an album for the same. Need to have it by 2/15 to be a part of the Album.

 Future of Valentine's day  

Throughout the history of language, words have taken on new and expanded meanings; Valentine's Day is no exception.

From an exclusive meaningful rendezvous between two lovers, the Valentine's Day will morph into an all-inclusive romantic day. It will become a universal affection day within a decade.

Valentine’s Day is a universal expression of affection between two individuals. Love has no bounds; it is between two people in love, husband and wife, mother and son, father daughter, brother sister, brothers, sisters, friends, uncles, aunties, Grandpa and Grandma and any one you care about.

Please feel free to say happy valentine to your sister, mother, brother, daughter, dad, uncle or a friend. It is a much bigger word now than it started out to be. Take them out for dinner and send them flowers to let them know that you care if you are the only one for them at this point in life.

While we express it by presenting red roses to our loved ones, the Filipinos will break another record; the number of people kissing at the same time, Brazil will have another major festival on her beaches celebrating love. You are welcome to share other such expressions. Now there is a selfie competition going as well.

On the other side of the world, a few frustrated ones with life go to the other end. The right wingers among orthodox Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews and others will start giving religious tones to it instead of going to their place of worship and seeking God's love.

Sadly, some of you are going to feel lonely, if you miss the love in your life; you have an opportunity to fulfill it. There is plenty in you that you can give by feeding the homeless, visiting lonely patients in the hospitals or nursing homes, disadvantage women and children, our veterans... share whatever little you have with them including the time and just listening to them. When a homeless person asks, give whatever you can, that is the most affectionate thing to do, you will enrich yourselves far greater by sharing.

Whenever the word affection comes to mind, I picture my dad and recall the way he called out my Mother's name Khairun, it was filled with affection and I have always enjoyed the sound of that, it was simply soothing to hear.

I dedicate these three songs to people in love.  

Kenny Roger's, you decorated my life: I particularly like the line which says, there is no rhyme or reason that is what love is all about. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJkPFSt326c

Ronnie Millsap’s, what a difference you made in my life, 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ni1WPGEZtg&feature=fvst

Muhammad Rafi's ai Husn Zara Jaag in Urdu/ Hindi, 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_qGtHjM6Oc

and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's, aap say mil kay in Urdu/Hindi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixRn65ImoRQ

My expressions would be incomplete without honoring the poet of love, Mirza Ghalib, one of the greatest romantic poets of all time who composed his poetry in Urdu/Hindi and Farsi.

Ishk per zor nahin, hai a o aatish ghalib
Ke lagaye na lege, bujhaye no bujhe.

Affection is that flame dear ole Ghalib,
it cannot be lit or extinguished,  it just happens.

If we can learn to respect the otherness of others and accept the God given uniqueness of each one of us, then conflicts fade and solutions emerge.

Be good to your fellow beings.

Happy Valentine's Day 

Thank you
mike
Mike Ghouse
(214) 325-1916 text/talk
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Mike Ghouse is a public speaker, thinker, writer and a commentator on Pluralism at work place, politics, religion, society, gender, race, culture, ethnicity, food and foreign policy. He is a staunch defender of human rights and his book standing up for others will be out soon, and a movie "Americans together" is in the making.  He is a frequent guest commentator on Fox News and syndicated Talk Radio shows and a writer at major news papers including Dallas Morning News and Huffington Post. All about him is listed in 63 links at www.MikeGhouse.net and his writings are at www.TheGhousediary.com and 10 other blogs. He is committed to building cohesive societies and offers pluralistic solutions on issues of the day.

Interfaith Marriages of Saif Alik Khan and Kareena Kapoor

Its a joy for me to read about  interfaith marriages where people respect the otherness of others, and accept the God given uniqueness of each one ... my standard sentence for 15 years. Did you see Saif Ali Khan used the same sentences but shortened?

The source of publication is not known, but I know about the actor and his parents. India has a long list of celebrities and politicians marrying interfaith.

Mike Ghouse

# # #

Saif Ali Khan, for those who may not know, is the son of actress Sharmila Tagore and cricketer the Nawab of Pataudi.

Below are his musings about religion, faith, God, politics, and modern society.

Intermarriage in India.

Written by Saif Ali Khan | Posted: October 15, 2014 2:20 am

I am the son of a sportsman, I grew up in England, Bhopal, Pataudi, Delhi and Mumbai, and I am more Indian than any Hindu or Muslim I know because I am both. I wrote this piece not to comment on the masses or the problems of communalism in India and its villages, but because this is an issue that concerns my friends and their families.

It wasn’t peacefully accepted by anyone, initially, when my parents wanted to marry. The royals had their issues; the Brahmins theirs. And, of course, extremists on both religious sides issued death threats. But the marriage still happened — the fact that my grandmother also had to fight to marry the not-as-wealthy and therefore not-so-suitable nawab of Pataudi might have helped things along. We grew up on real-life romantic stories about our elders marrying for love and not worrying too much about tradition. And we were brought up to believe that god is one, with many names.

When Kareena and I married, there were similar death threats, with people on the Net saying ridiculous things about “love jihad”. We follow whatever religion or spiritual practice we believe in. We talk about them and respect each other’s views. I hope our children will do the same.

I have prayed in church and attended mass with Kareena, while she has bowed her head at dargahs and prayed in mosques. When we purified our new home, we had a havan and a Quran reading and a priest sprinkling holy water — no chances taken!

What is religion? What is faith? Does a perfect definition exist? I don’t know. But I know doubt. I’m intrigued by the politics of doubt. Doubt gives us faith. Doubt keeps us questioning what keeps us alive. If we become sure of something, then there is a danger of becoming fanatical.

Religion needs to be separated from a lot of things. Our religions are based on fear. The Old Testament spoke of a Promised Land for a people, but there were people already living there. The problem is still burning today. There have been too many atrocities committed in the name of god.

I know good people are scared of marrying their daughters to Muslims. They fear conversion, quick divorces, multiple marriages — basically, it suits the boys a bit more than the girls. All this is undoubtedly outdated. A lot of Islam needs to modernise and renew itself in order to be relevant. We also need a loud moderate voice to separate the good from the evil. Islam today is more unpopular than it has ever been. This is a great shame to me, as I have always thought of Islam as the moon, the desert, calligraphy and flying carpets, the thousand and one nights. I have always thought about it as a religion of peace and submission. As I grew older, I saw religion twisted and used so badly by men that I distanced myself from all man-made religion. I choose to be as spiritual as I can be.

Anyway, I digress. The good news is that no one needs to convert from their religion to get married. The Special Marriage Act, when applicable, is the paramount law of the land. If you marry under this, it is upheld over any religious law. It is truly secular.

The fabric of India is woven from many threads — English, Muslim, Hindu and many others. A major concern in today’s India is that we keep deleting our past. To say Muslims don’t have a role in India is denying their importance and contribution. It is like saying women don’t have a part to play in India. Why do we need to deny Islam? It’s what we are. We come with our mix. To deny this is to cheat us of our inheritance. I don’t know what “love jihad” is. It is a complication created in India. I know intermarriages because I am a child of one and my children are born out of it. Intermarriage is not jihad. Intermarriage is India. India is a mix. Ambedkar said the only way to annihilate caste is intermarriage. It is only through intermarriage that the real Indians of tomorrow can be truly equipped to take our nation forward with the right perspective. I am the product of such a mixed marriage and my life has been full of Eid and Holi and Diwali. We were taught to do adaab and namaste with equal reverence.

It is sad that too much importance is given to religion, and not enough to humanity and love. My children were born Muslim but they live like Hindus (with a pooja ghar at home), and if they wanted to be Buddhist, they would have my blessing.

That’s how we were brought up.

We are a blend, this great country of ours. It is our differences that make us who we are. We need to get beyond mere tolerance. We need to accept and respect and love each other.

We are most certainly not a secular country. The intention was to become one and our Constitution has provided every framework to make that possible. But, more than six decades on, we have still not separated religion from the law. To make matters worse, different laws apply to different people, making it impossible for us to think as one. There are different laws for Hindus and different laws for Muslims. This is bound to create trouble.

I think we should have one law for all Indians, a uniform civil code, and we should all think of ourselves as one nation. All our religions must come later and be by the way. Teach our children about God and his thousand names, but first we must teach them respect and love of their fellow man. That is more important.

I stopped believing in the Tooth Fairy first, then Santa Claus, and finally, I really don’t know what I feel about a personal god. But I believe in love and in trying to be good and helping the world. I don’t always succeed and then I feel bad. My conscience is my god, I think, and it tells me that that one tree in Pataudi near which my father is buried is closer to god than any temple, church or mosque.

Saif Ali Khan is an actor and producer

In love and marriage, do different faiths really matter in America?

DO INTERFAITH MARRIAGES MATTER?

http://interfaithmarriages.blogspot.com/

Religions don’t marry, but people do, and what brings them together in the first place is a shared interest, evolved out of living their daily life at work, school, gym, bars, conferences and even the place of worship, indeed, that is what connects them.

As a Pluralist, I am blessed to have performed numerous weddings for couples in their own religious traditions like the Hindu-Christian, Muslim-Jain, Jewish-Christian, Muslim-Hindu and other combinations. We can highlight the beautiful wisdom of each faith as a part of the sermon to bring a sense of completeness to their wedding.

Texas Faith: In love and marriage, do different faiths really matter in America?

By Rudolph Bush
rbush@dallasnews.com
10:47 am on June 10, 2014 | Permalink

Recently, I attended the beautiful wedding of two friends, one from a Jewish family and one from a Christian family. The ceremony largely followed the Jewish tradition with occasional mention of the bride’s Christian upbringing.

I began to wonder, witnessing this blending of two people into one couple bound under God, what place separate faiths really serve in our society. If we are honest, there is no justifying the fundamental difference in belief between Christians and Jews or the other major faiths. But in cases like these, it is our cultural homogeneity that is more important than the tenets of our faith.

Given that, what does faith really mean in circumstances like these? Is faith or religion simply ceremonial? Or are we overcoming divisions in the name of something greater – that is – love?

Read our panelists’ responses below.

MIKE GHOUSE, President, Foundation for Pluralism and speaker on interfaith matters, Dallas


Religions don’t marry, but people do, and what brings them together in the first place is a shared interest, evolved out of living their daily life at work, school, gym, bars, conferences and even the place of worship, indeed, that is what connects them.

These couples must be admired by one and all. In an increasingly egocentric world, when people have difficulty in getting along, they are setting a new standard of respecting the otherness of others (defined as Pluralism).

It is disappointing to many couples, that their clergy or the parents insist on the other person to convert to their faith tradition, some do, and some fake it and some are not even comfortable with the idea.

When a couple is deeply committed to marry, they go ahead and get married anyway without the ceremony due to religious restrictions, but they sorely miss out on the integral part of their tradition they grew up with; a religious cultural wedding. There is good news for such couples now; an interfaith wedding.

As a Pluralist, I am blessed to have performed numerous weddings for couples in their own religious traditions like the Hindu-Christian, Muslim-Jain, Jewish-Christian, Muslim-Hindu and other combinations. We can highlight the beautiful wisdom of each faith as a part of the sermon to bring a sense of completeness to their wedding.

There is a cautionary side of the interfaith marriage, as Naomi Schaefer Riley reports in her book, How Interfaith Marriage is Transforming America, “The growing number of interfaith couples don’t know what they’re getting into. Interfaith couples tend to marry without thinking through the practical implications of their religious differences. They assume that because they are decent and tolerant people … they will not encounter difficulties being married to someone of another faith.” She insists, “But faith is a tricky thing and it sneaks up on people,” especially at significant moments when the pull of old loyalties supposedly outgrown reasserts itself. “The death of a loved one, the birth of a child, the loss of a job, a move to a new city — all of these things can give people a sense of religious longing, a desire to return to the faith of their childhood.”

One must be fully secure in himself or herself to learn to accept each other’s uniqueness, then conflicts fade and solutions emerge.

To read the other panelists, go to Dallas Morning news at
http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/2014/06/texas-faith-in-love-and-marriage-do-different-faiths-really-matter-in-america.html/#more-40530...............................................................................................................................
Mike Ghouse is a speaker, thinker and a writer on pluralism, politics, peace, Islam, Israel, India, interfaith, and cohesion at work place. He is committed to building a Cohesive America and offers pluralistic solutions on issues of the day at www.TheGhousediary.com. He believes in Standing up for others and a book with the same title is coming up. Mike has a strong presence on national and local TV, Radio and Print Media. He is a frequent guest on Sean Hannity show on Fox TV, and a commentator on national radio networks, he contributes weekly to the Texas Faith Column at Dallas Morning News; fortnightly at Huffington post; and several other periodicals across the world. His personal site www.MikeGhouse.net indexes all his work through many links.

Amita Weds Sarah

This is for the first time, a woman has chosen another woman's name as her last name in a gay-lesbian marriage and this the 2nd most publicized wedding of two Indian women. Both married White women and chose to be the feminine part of the relationship. 

 

Years ago I did some research on the preference of single women in a marriage. There are thousands of Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Christian and Muslim single women in the United States.  Most of them were in their late forties to late fifties. They were sick of Indian and Pakistani men, who I was told were lewd in their conversations. Many of them have given up the hopes to marry, they rather be single than live with a creep.

Most of them over 50 had listed "spirituality" for religion and were bold to write they do not care about religion;  all men were the same!  I have heard many confessions that they would rather live with another woman.

One of the saddest part of that conversations was the bias that deepened in them against Indian or Pakistani men, or Hindu or Muslim men.  No doubt there are bad guys among us, but so are in every race, ethnicity, nationality and religion, perhaps the same percentage. After breaking up with romance, they were too quick to reiterate their biases that their parents had injected in them.

Think about this, we are messing with our children by running our sewers in their hearts and minds. They can have a beautiful life if we don't prejudice them towards others. Shame on us for training our kids to be bigots. I am not bragging, but I took both of my kids to every place of worship - yes, every one indeed and they are grown ups now with no bias towards any. However, my son had faced some ugly comments from a handful of "Pakis" and before the bias could become a part of him, I was able to strip it from him.  This goes the other way too. I taught them the same lesson that my father taught - that individuals tend to do bad things and we cannot blame a group for the acts of the individuals.

 

How about you? Do you help your kids to be free from bias or worsen it? You know it amounts to poisoning them and robbing them from their happiness. Yeah the Hindus are like that.. or what do you expect from Muslims?

A few years down the road, I may have a university do research on the topic.

By the way, if you or your friends have kids who want to get married, I perform the interfaith weddings with customized sermons to reflect their religious traditions. They are going to get married any way, and no one should be denied the joy of their life by giving them a touch of their tradition.  I have done Jewish-Christian, Christian-Hindu, Muslim-Jain, Hindu-Muslim, Atheist-Christian weddings. You can visit my site http://interfaithmarriages.blogspot.com/

 

Its human to live in comfort and dignity, thanks to the United States culture, it accommodates the uniqueness of individuals and indeed it is the land of the brave and free.  

Mike Ghouse

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Amita Parashar, Sarah Kelly

Amita Parashar and Sarah Jean Kelly are to be married Sunday at the Historical Thatched Cottage, an event space in Centerport, N.Y. Genevieve Dreizen, a Universal Life minister, will officiate, assisted by Janelle Perron Jennings, a friend of the couple who was ordained by Open Ministry for the event. The ceremony will incorporate Hindu traditions and an Irish blessing.

Enlarge This Image

The couple met in 2002 at Wellesley College, from which they graduated.

Ms. Parashar (left), 28, will be known as Ms. Parashar Kelly. She is a producer for National Public Radio in Washington, where she works on the show “Tell Me More.” She received a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia.

She is the daughter of Usha Joshi Parashar and Om D. Parashar of Los Alamitos, Calif. Her mother, who is retired, was a registered nurse at the West Los Angeles Medical Center, part of the Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System.

Ms. Kelly, 30, is the executive director of the Electronic Discovery Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization in Washington that works with lawyers and litigation support practitioners on how to best use electronic data. She received a master’s degree in education from the University of Virginia and a law degree from Georgetown.

She is a daughter of Rose Moran-Kelly and Morgan F. Kelly of Rockaway Park, Queens. Her father is a managing director and the general counsel for Breeden Capital Management in Greenwich, Conn. Her mother is a lead nurse practitioner of urgent care at Bellevue Hospital Center and an adjunct associate professor of nursing at Pace University, both in Manhattan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/fashion/weddings/amita-parashar-sarah-kelly.html

 

Mike Ghouse
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