Everyday Hinduism, or How to order bindis from India

"In memories of her beloved, life is restless with longing.
He's in the bindi on my forehead.
He's in the sleepiness of my lashes."
-from the song "Dola Re Dola," Devdas


Fig.1 Oooooh shiny

'Twas a hot summer day in 2006 when my best friend Connie and I went to Islands of Adventure in Orlando. As is typical whenever we go to theme parks together, we were feeling adventurous and decided to work up the courage to hit the rollercoasters. Having grown up in central Florida, we had our share of hours on various thrill rides at Busch Gardens, Sea World, Disney, EPCOT, Animal Kingdom, and Universal Studios, but had never really taken advantage of the superior rides at IOA. Once we survived (and loved!) the Dueling Dragons, we were gung-ho for The Hulk and actually returned to the Dragons for a second time.

Somewhere in there, though, we stopped in at one of the Lost Civilization Island’s fantasy bazaar (now refurbished into Harry Potter World, or whatever), where all the shops are made up to look like they were lifted straight from Aladdin. Of course, I found the tent hawking the overpriced bellydancing supplies and fawned over the jingly belts and earrings and costumes I would never buy outside of a Renaissance Faire (much better deals). But I did pick up a small packet of multicolored bindis and promptly shared them with Connie. I wore a pink one and she wore blue, to coordinate with our t-shirt colors. We felt extra pretty walking around all day with our foreheads so adorned, but little did I know this one impulse purchase would lead to a new personal fashion habit that continues to this day.

Fig.2 Bollywood Babe Wannabe sighting in Key West

A few weeks later, I brought the same set of bindis with me on a week-long family trip to Key West. Key West, being Key West, is the provenance of all things kitsch and casual in my beloved state of Florida. Art shops, pirate jewelry sellers, pizza parlours, creperies, Margaritaville, Sloppy Joe’s, the Hog’s Breath Saloon—all bathed in the colors of the setting sun and neon signs. Almost everything we ate was seafood or was impregnated with key lime the same way everything on Dune is impregnated with Spice. It’s warm and inviting, but small and colorful and comforting, and you get the feeling that after dark, anything goes on Duval Street. There are kitschy restaurant bars every 50 feet, trinket shops in between, and streetside kiosks offering henna tattoos. It was just the kind of place I could wear my bindis, buy a sari (which I did), and walk around wearing both without feeling out of place.

When I got home, the bindis stuck, but I soon realized that they have an expiration date. The glue doesn’t hold out for long, and they get cruddy after a few weeks of constant use.

Fig.3 That's a SERIOUS Bindi

"Bindi" means “dot” in Sanskrit. Originally, they signified age, marriage, and/or religious affiliation, depending on who was wearing one (yes, even men wear the mark of sindoor on holy occasions). Traditional ones were simply crimson or yellow vermillion powder applied to the forehead during temple ceremonies or everyday home shrine puja offerings. The placement is meant to represent the ajna chakra, known as the center of insight and wisdom. The color red also represents the femenine power of the goddesses Sati and Parvati, and women who wear this tilak ("mark") will receive their blessings.

After years of watching Hindi movies (I promise a post on that soon!), I had seen every shape and size of bindi worn by hot Bollywood actresses, and it was just a matter of time before I decided that I wanted a piece of that action. Sometimes they wore them, sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes they wore big gaudy ones for special occasions.


Fig.4 Aishvarya Rai pimpin' her bindi in the movie Devdas

South Asian women in modern times treat the bindi as any other piece of jewelry or fashion accessory, no matter what their social status or association. As a result, they now come in an eye-popping array of styles, as I soon discovered when I went online to search for an internet site that sold them. Bindis come in every color to match your outfit and every size and shape to suit your occasion. They come plain or encrusted with crystals, pearls, and metallic accents.

The first site I ordered from sent me a small slightly battered package a few weeks later. It was a box wrapped in white cloth, sewed up with thread, my address was written in blue marker on the top, and it was slapped with a customs declaration certificate from Vastrapur Ahmedabad, India. It certainly looked like it had come from halfway around the world. Pretty wild, right?


Fig.5 We're not in Delhi anymore, Toto

I have since tried other sites as well, and one, Visionsofindia.com, hails from California, so my packages come much more quickly. Now, I’ll purchase between eight and ten new little packets of bindis every three months or so, so I get to try new styles all the time. I wear them everyday, every time I go out. It’s as obligatory as earrings or a necklace and I feel naked if I forget to put one on. The websites sell skin-safe bindi glue, but I’ve found that eyelash glue works very well, too. I have quite a collection, and I use the old ones to fancify picture frames or bedazzle some other craft I may be creating.
I’ve been lucky that my employer has no objection to my little quirk. Sometimes I think that they think it’s a strictly religious thing, and what with all the Islamic hijab-related school uniform debates in the news, they don’t want to be sued for discrimination. They don’t care about my tiny gold nose stud either, which is even more innocuous than the bindis, but complements my overall recherché Indian fashion so well that neither register as especially unusual.

Early on, my good friends got used to it immediately, calling it “such a Caity thing.” Given that they’ve witnessed my long history of hair and jewelry-related personal fashion kicks through the years, bindi-wearing was an organic development.


Fig.6 Another trademark "Caity Thing"

The most frequent inquiry from co-workers or random people standing in line at the cash register is about whether or not it’s a piercing, and I have to explain that it’s really just a snazzy sticker. I also get asked whether it “means something,” and I say that for me, it’s just something pretty, and what girl doesn’t like a little something extra sparkly to wear? I also clarify the ancient versus modern interpretation of its significance, and I feel happy that I’ve injected a bit of world culture into someone’s day.

When I’m out in places full of people who don’t work with me everyday and are incidentally immune to the oddity of bindis, I get glances and outright stares, especially from little kids who point tug at their mother’s shirt and poke at their own foreheads to communicate their absolute amazement at my facial adornment. I’ve even gotten a few bright elementary school children who correctly identify it as an “Indian” thing. They love it, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them start running around with Dora The Explorer stick-on earrings worn on their ajna chakras.

At the end of the day, I remind myself that the Buddha wore bindis, and protecting the wisdom chakra with a bindi never hurts. The last thing I do after getting ready for the day is choose a bindi to wear, and in that way, what began as a fashion statement has evolved into religious ritual for me. The bindi does mean something to me. It’s a constant expression of my faith in beauty, wisdom, and individuality. With that definition behind the bindi, I don’t foresee my ever growing tired of it.

Fig.7 A girl has so many choices...

Sunrise, Sunset

“I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.”
--Elie Wiesel


Fig. 1 My Nature Coast sunset

On Wednesday, 12 September 2007, I went to the beach with my sister. It was a typical sun-kissed September day, and some fluffy clouds rolled in the late afternoon, just in time for a photoshoot during the “Magic Hour.” Before hopping into the car, my sister grabbed her camera, and I grabbed handfuls of sand from my Zen garden and I put some in my pockets.

We drove out to Pine Island, which is just about the smallest beach in existence. It’s a spit of land on the margin of a saltwater marsh connected to Nature Coast scrub prairie by a long but modest two-lane limestone dirt causeway. The road winds out to where a handful of stilt houses have taken up residence, along with a small park skirted by white quarried sand trucked out there for the enjoyment of sunbathers and castle builders.

Pine Island is almost never what you’d normally define as “populated.” By Santa Monica standards, PI is as deserted as a beach on Pluto, hosting more seagulls and almond-sized crabs than humans. It’s one of the Gulf Coast’s many little secrets that require no more than direct knowledge and $2 for parking (and even that is waived after a certain hour). When the neon-cheddar-orange disc of the sun dipped into the Gulf of Mexico, we emptied our pockets into the water, symbolically casting off our sins and problems from the past year and letting the tiny waves carry them away.


Fig 2. Suck it, sin!

My sister, the natural photographer, got some great shots of this event. A Pine Island sunset is remarkable enough without ushering in a religious holiday, but hey, the more spiritual significance, the merrier. Ushering out the old year with water, sand and warm autumnal sunsets appeals more than a cold January garish ball drop several latitudes away.

That was our first Rosh Hashanah.

When I first decided to study everything, I began with investigating holidays. Everyone loves an excuse for getting out of work and spending a day full of music, food, and fireworks with the occasional James Bond movie marathon.

Fig. 3 Daniel Craig: Good for the Jews
(see Munich & Defiance... seriously, go see them)

Jews have accumulated an impressive number of holidays not because it’s so ancient (Hinduism beats it by a thousand years or so) or because they’re particularly self-congratulatory (all the Woody Allen self-deprecation says otherwise), but because the Torah focuses so much on remembrance and preserving memory of the Tribe’s incredible history. For eighteen minutes of that incredible history, try downloading The Tribe short film from iTunes. Best two sheckels ever spent. See also: West Bank Story. I think it won "Best Use of Hummus in a Short Subject Film" at the Oscars.

There are a lot of fasts and feasts throughout the year, but there are fourteen that will show up in the most religiously aware of wall calendars, and they’re all fun to pronounce: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret, Simchat Torah, Chanukah, Tu B’shvat, Purim, Pesach, Yom HaSho’ah, Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Lag B’Omer, Shavuot, and Tisha B’av. They last from one to ten days (depending on who you ask), and they’re brimming with all the mentally enticing symbols and customs my culturally titillated heart adores.

For me, 5768 (according to the Hebrew calendar) was a do-it-yourself year of becoming less of a blatant shiksa, and I still enjoy my new traditions of celebrating the big ones in my own freestyle way.

Fig. 4 Not kosher

Next weekend, I’ll post my reflections on Chanukah (Hanukkah, whatever, as long as it has 8 letters, it's spelled right), which begins this year at sunset on December 11. It’s one of the few Jewish holidays that manifest with a small, dedicated section of the seasonal greeting cards aisle in Target, along with an endcap shelf containing menorahs, candles, and decorative gel window clings. So break out your dreidels and latke recipes and your Yiddish dictionary and join me for some oil-soaked fun!

My Faith In Pop Culture

Lisa: Mom, Dad, my spiritual quest is over... I'm a Buddhist! Homer: What? That's it -- no more chat rooms for you! The Simpsons

Fig. 1 Batholomew's angel

In the beginning, there were movies and TV: the sacred texts of the great American secular religion. Hollywood is the Holy Land. The stars are our charismatic gods and goddesses. The movie theatres, our temples. Popcorn and Coke the body and blood of our Savior: sweet, sweet Entertainment.

There is much wisdom to be found in the discourses of Lama Chaplin, His Holiness Hitchcock, or Saint Spielberg:

When things get desperate, eat your shoe.

A boy’s best friend is not always his mother.

No matter how prepared you think you are, you’re probably going to need a bigger boat.

When I was a kid, the most religious thing I did was watch Mr. Wizard every morning before school while my grandmother struggled to brush my knotty, curl-infested hair. I conducted experiments on basil seeds and ivy vine clippings on my bedroom windowsill, corralled grasshoppers and tadpoles just to catch a glimpse of their life cycles, collected rocks, and had a serious crush on Bill Nye The Science Guy (and I still do, but he now shares nerd-swoonability with Neil deGrasse Tyson).


Fig. 2 & 3 Science Guys


In 1996, I turned thirteen and my Christian confirmation was on the horizon. I also discovered my two favorite TV shows of all time: The X-Files and The Daily Show. This year is as prominent in my personal pop cultural fossil record as the iridium-laced KT-boundary in Cretaceous rock strata. I believe that multitudinous moments and experiences contribute to and lead up to what we call peak moments in our lives, but those two shows have definitely had a significant and enduring effect on my current adult mindset. To say they inspired me is like saying Jesus made a fairly good point to a dozen of his buddies around a dinner table. My Confirmation, appropriately enough, also marked an essential attitude adjustment toward religion in general.


Fig. 4 Crackpot

I went to confirmation classes, and you better believe it was reluctantly. More than anything else, it was a ginormous waste of my precious after school Bill Nye time. I knew there was more to life than Sunday School. I mean, come on. How could you not watch The X-Files? Because it’s got satanic subject matter? Aliens aren’t in the Bible? Neither are chocolate Easter bunnies, but you believe in them, don’t you?

At one of the classes, we watched a video featuring a young man describing his atheism. He went on about his beliefs and sounded pretty convinced that there’s no God. Unexpectedly enough, he still went to church with his family and subsequently expressed his contempt for the people he saw there who only showed up once or twice a year for the big holidays. He sounded mildly disgusted by such behavior and continued voicing his opinions about being atheist.

At the end of the video, my confirmation crew asked, “Does he really sound like an atheist?” Internally, I replied (in more 13-year-old language), “Sounds like a bored, apathetic teenager tagging along with his folks because he enjoys making dry ironic observations about hypocritical society.” But of course, the faithful interpreted his comments as a closet Jesus lover trying to express himself. I’m still not entirely sure what they were trying to accomplish in that session, but when you introduce a video like that, it makes confirmation feel like some self-pitying agnostics anonymous program.

At the end of the whole thing, my “secret sponsor” gave me a tack-pin with a mustard seed inside and a card explaining the Bible verse associated with it. It’s a cool verse, and appealed to my burgeoning English major heart. For a moment, I held that pin, re-reading the verse over and over, feeling a little part of me drying up and falling off: my umbilicus to freedom. Something said to me “This is it. You’re Christian now. Deal with it.” Obviously, that’s not what you should feel about your religion. But what the hell did I know?

I soon noticed that my tiny gold cross necklace I was given as a baby matched the one Dana Scully wore on The X-Files, so that never left my neck except to shower. Every night before bed, I prayed a standard obligatory form prayer with blanks that I filled in with hopes for protection over family and friends. Church was still boring, and I began to get self-righteous about all the self-righteous church-goers who judged non-church-goers as being unfaithful or lazy. I decided that I could be faithful whether I spent my Sunday mornings bored to tears or not.

To prove my righteousness, I pointed out an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer stays at home while Marge and the kids go to church. God still hangs out with Homer even though he isn’t “in God’s House” on Sundays. I thought that was awesome. If God couldn’t love me enough to appreciate that I could bask in his glory by sleeping in and watching rented movies on Sundays, then I would give up. If my church were as quirky as Reverend Lovejoy’s, I would have attended more often than not. Still, Methodism had nothing on the entertainment factor of my science or my Hollywood religion. God has Moses. Hollywood has Charlton Heston. No contest.

Fig. 5 Let there be matzos

When I started studying at UF, I felt totally freed from any iota of nagging obligation whatsoever to go to church. My umbilicus to freedom regenerated and I stuck with my televisual roots. I schlepped boxes of X-Files recorded on VHS tapes into my already cramped dorm, clinging to them like Linus’ security blanket. I found that my generation took up watching The Daily Show as standard practice, and Jon Stewart was as ubiquitous a sight in the common room as greasy pizza boxes and dirty dishes.

Ten days after 9/11/01, I consulted the one spiritual adviser every American knows will make them feel some modicum of normality no matter what: television. I sat in front of my thirteen-inch dorm room TV-VCR combo unit and I saw Jon Stewart get choked up during his unexpectedly touching return-to-air speech. It was the first moment I felt the oftentimes invisible connection between tragedy and comedy and how one deeply informs the other. I reached for the nearest tissue and told myself that this man was now worthy of my worship. Another god in my pantheon of show biz.

I was a born-again TDS viewer. Just let Jon into your heart and be saved!

Fig. 6 Moment of Zen

I never had a problem with Jesus. I never had a problem with my parents. I'm not one of these self-loathing-formerly-Christian-church-bashing twentysomethings who go Buddhist just because it's not my parents' religion or because it's hip. I live in Hernando County, Florida. There's no pressure to be hip. Spring Hill would never be prefaced with the adjective "hip."

I was simply never a very institution-oriented person. I loved empiricism, but I wasn't cynical. I had a great family life, great friends, and had fun. I wasn’t on drugs, I wasn’t unintentionally pregnant or festering with STDs. I got educated and got a respectable job. My friends and family loved me and I loved them. I was satisfied with my non-denominational moral compass. It worked for me.

Then one day, I realized I had no idea how or why my compass worked. It wasn’t broken, but my brain needed an upgrade to understand how to read it.

In the December 2005 issue of National Geographic, along came an article about Buddhism’s recent spread across the world. All I knew about it before I started reading that first paragraph was that it involved meditating and it came from a place in which Brad Pitt once spent seven cinematic years hanging out with the Dalai Lama. The article outlined a basic overview of the Dharma with its calm Vulcan-like reverence for logic, and how it’s been manifesting in Western culture. It was very appealing to my Bill Nye-loving brain. I read another shorter article on growing Muslim populations in the world and felt a small pang of regret that I didn’t really belong to a spiritual group I felt I could be intellectually honest with myself about following.

I knew that guilt about someone dying for my sins was not my slice of key lime pie, but I had no trustworthy paradigm to put my beliefs in context. My comparative religion education consisted of little more than Ancient Egypt class and Fiddler On The Roof. The only things I chose to recall from church was eating freeze-dried ice cream at an outer-space-themed Vacation Bible School and ringing spotless gold bells so shiny and expensive you had to wear white gloves to touch them.

I had to re-assess what I had in my spiritual bindle.



To be continued...