Friday 16 November 2012

An Important Announcement - Our Western Hemisphere forum is officially OPEN

Forum Details

As of 16/11/2012 I am sending you the links to our new forum and related blogs via this email, please read the attachment. I will continue with my Hindu Temple Community projects in Leeds, Birmingham, Leicester and London. This is a personal project that I started about six months ago because of all the friends that I have made from the other Hindu Communities in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. The internet has made it possible for all of us to exchange so much of information over the years that we have taken this technological marvel for granted. I get so many emails every day which started off as simple questions about the Hindu community in Leeds, questions like 'where do you get incense from in Leeds?' which have evolved into questions which cover many diverse topics within the Hindu Community worldwide over the past 7 years.

As I mentioned in my newsletter the purpose of having a forum is to allow individuals to ask questions and get answers from other members to actually talk and to promote quality interactivity within the community as we have so many professionals in every field I can think of, this is the next logical step. As of today, when I use the word community, I'm not talking about just Hindus in the UK .We have a forum which already has about 173 members for the test phase alone - I only wanted a 100 but someone told somebody else who told his cousin and so on and so forth. About 37 members are from Birmingham, Leicester and London  Most of our members are second and third generation Hindu professionals living in the United States, Canada. This is a joint venture with our sister sites in the US and Canada and their respective webmasters

How do you sign up?
Please read the attachment. It has all the necessary information based on the opt-in form you filled out. The forum is free. It is a private forum and I have corresponded with most of you over the past few years, so I know who I'm inviting. The general criteria is that you have to be a Hindu professional born in the West, living here or working here for at least 2 years and above the age of 21. I am looking at starting a Junior sub-forum for those below 21 once I find the right moderator(s).
You will be required to register to participate in the forum which will cover everything from religious activity, cooking, finances, education, medical - anything that you can think of that relates to the modern Hindu living in the western world today.

Member contributions will also be more than welcome. Mrs Patel from Mount Pleasant, Vancouver, BC, Shree Mahalakshmi Temple - you've been telling me about your vegetarian sausage recipe, send me your recipe and I will publish it in our vegetarian recipe blog. The same applies to everyone who has something valuable to contribute, whether you're a doctor who wants to write about golf, an engineer who wants to talk about mountain climbing - it's all good. Also my good friend Mr Mohan from New York. Mohan is a habitual house buyer and owns about 12 houses in NY. He started from scratch and I'm sure he can provide a great deal of sound advice on buying houses.

I am moderating the forum initially with a couple of volunteers as that job has fallen on my shoulders. I would like more volunteers to come forward and help moderate- I cannot stay awake 24/7. Our servers currently handle a few hundred members every day and our host will be happy to increase our bandwidth as membership goes up and I expect this to happen soon as I have sent out the official invites this evening.

I will still be sending out the newsletter attached to our regular emails.

Please participate. This project will bring the Hindu community in the West a lot closer.

Our friends in the United States and Canada are members of
 Sathya Sai Baba centres,
 Shirdi Sai Baba centres,
 Swaminarayan Mandir,
 Ganesha Temples, Vinayakar Temples
 Murugan Temples, Skanda Temples,
 Durga Temples,
 Kaliamman Temples,
 Meenakshi Temples,
 Sivan Temples,
 Lakshmi-Narayan Temples
 Mahalakshmi Temples
 Mahavishnu Temples
 ISKCON Worldwide
 and more

We will be following the events and festivals of all the above including community activity, seva (service to the community) on the forum.

thank you