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A school district in Pennsylvania (USA) is offering Hindi, official language of India, to its pupils from the next semester.

Students in this course offered by Bensalem Township School District (BTSD) will reportedly learn speaking and writing Hindi and expressing themselves in Hindi. They will be taught “conversational Hindi using authentic written and visual materials” and will be “consistently engaged in interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational modes of communication”.

Welcoming this development, Indo-American statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada (USA) today, applauded BTSD for introducing Hindi to high schoolers and urged school districts around the country to offer Indian languages like Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, etc., in their schools.

Rajan Zed, who is Chairperson of Indo-American Leadership Confederation, further said that besides learning the rich languages and culture of India, it would also make a good business sense to open-up the American children to these as India was on track to become a global power. Moreover, USA being a culturally diverse society, introducing languages of India would bring more cohesiveness and harmony in the communities. In addition, American children of India-descent would be able to keep their languages, traditions and culture alive and intact, Zed added.

Hindustani is reportedly the fourth highly spoken language in the world after Chinese, Spanish and English and has more speakers than Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German, French, Italian, Dutch, etc.

This Hindi course will be offered as an elective for students who have completed two years of another language at the high school level, according to Sharon Doyle, Bensalem High School principal’s secretary, who adds that if it does well, then a higher-level course in Hindi might also be added. Besides English, District already offers Spanish, French, Japanese and Latin.

Heather D. Nicholas, Kim J. Rivera and Yagnesh S. Choksi are President, Vice President and Member of School Board respectively; while Dr. David E. Baugh and Dr. Monica McHale-Small are Superintendent and Assistant Superintendent of BTSD whose Mission includes: "provide a first class education for the whole child”. It has about 6300 students and about 85% of its graduates go for higher education.

Bensalem Township in Pennsylvania, established 1692, is known as "Community of Firsts", “A Model for America” and “1 of 100 Best Communities in the United States to Raise Children”. Joseph DiGirolamo is the Mayor of this town, which is home to Philadelphia Park Racetrack and Mongkoltepmunee Buddhist Temple. Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of USA, often travelled to Bensalem and M. Night Shyamalan movie Signs was partly shot here.

Hindus ask Europe to address issue of stateless Gypsies urgently

Hindus want Europe to wake-up and do something concrete to improve the plight of stateless Roma (Gypsies), who suffer rejection day after day.

Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada (USA) today, said that the issue of Roma statelessness should be urgently addressed and stateless Roma around the Europe needed to be protected from severe and continuous violation of their human rights.

Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, pointed out that access of stateless to health services, employment, education, property ownership and travel was severely restricted and they faced detention and inability to obtain identity papers.  They were denied the most basic of rights and were vulnerable to trafficking.

Leaders of various religions/denominations, including His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, should also come forward and advocate on behalf of stateless Roma and highlight their plight as religions told us to help the helpless, Rajan Zed stated.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says “statelessness refers to the condition of an individual who is not considered as a national by any state”.

Finnair treated passengers with “Om Shanti Om” live dance on Helsinki-Delhi flight

Finnair surprised the world and the passengers when its cabin crew on Helsinki-Delhi flight, dressed in colorful traditional Indian attire, reportedly burst into Bollywood dance-song sequence of “Deewangi Deewangi”.

Starting with "Finnair congratulates India on Republic Day on January 26", they reportedly treated the passengers with a live choreographed Bollywood performance on board through the aisles.

Indo-American statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada (USA) today, applauded Finnair for this wonderful showing of respect, warmth and joy on India’s 63 Republic Day, depicting that they really cared and willing to go an extra mile.

Video of this performance has become a YouTube sensation since then. According to reports, flight attendant Helena Kaartinen coined this idea and then worked towards it with rehearsals by enlisting the services of an expert. She brought together a group of few dozen flight attendants and even drafted a pilot.  

This song-dance was from Shah Rukh Khan starrer movie “Om Shanti Om” (2007, Farah Khan) and the song was “Deewangi Deewangi”.

Rajan Zed, who is Chairperson of Indo-American Leadership Confederation, pointed out that despite the complexities of consumerist society, corporations should show that they really had heart and feelings for the customers instead of treating them just as statistics.

Finnair, launched in 1923, whose tagline is “Discover peace of mind” and who claims to be eco-friendlier, flies to over 70 destinations. Finnish government holds 55.8 per cent of its shares and during 2010 it carried over seven million passengers and over 120 thousand tonnes of cargo and mail. Harri Sailas is Chairman of its Board while Mika Vehviläinen is the CEO.