The Devaswom Board is headed by CPM leaders who control the Kerala govt. The circular has been issued again pointing out that the officials are not following the order issued two years ago. The new order comes amid the inclusion of party leaders in the advisory committees of the Devaswom Board and the deliberate capture of other temple committees by the CPM.
Many temples, including the great temples in Kerala, were restored as part of the Hindu renaissance. At that time, the CPM demanded that the temples should be demolished and agriculture should be done there. CPM’s approach was that temples are the centre of superstitions.
The temple restoration efforts led by the Kerala kshetra SamrakshanaSamithi and its former form, the Malabar kshetra SamrakshanaSamithi brought the temples of Kerala to their present state. Sangha Sakhas are held in some of these temple sanctuaries. As the temples were renovated and the revenue increased, the government continued to take over the temples through the Devaswom Boards in anticipation of financial gain.
The decision of the Travancore Devaswom Board will not adversely affect the Sangha sakhas in any way. The vast majority of sakhas in Kerala are held in public places, private places and our own places. A few sakhas are held on temple grounds under the Devaswom Board with the full cooperation of local devotees. The current circular of the Devaswom Board aims to take over temples, cover up corruption in temple administration and engage with Muslim communal organizations under the guise of taking action against the RSS.
The trailor of Vipul Amrutlal Shah’s upcoming movie “The Kerala Story,” which reveals the events behind the disappearance of 32,000 women in the state of Kerala is going viral on the internet.
The teaser promises to be a very authentic, unbiased, and truthful tale of events that shook Kerala. The film, which Sudipto Sen directed under the guidance of Vipul Shah, tells the startling and heartbreaking story of a terrorist organisation manipulating women trafficking from God’s own land.
The straightforward yet powerful trailer tells the story of one such victim, Adah Sharma, who aspired to be a nurse but was stolen from her home and is now imprisoned in Afghanistan as an ISIS terrorist.
The movie is getting ready facing a lot of challenges, however, the producer Vipul Amrutlal Shah was determined. According to reports, director Sudipto Sen travelled to the state and even throughout Arab nations to meet with residents and victims’ relatives.
According to a recent research, almost 32,000 Hindu and Christian females from Kerala and Mangalore have been converted to Islam since 2009, with the majority of them ending up in Syria, Afghanistan, and other ISIS and Haqqani-controlled territories. The film will reveal the facts behind this plot as well as the anguish of these ladies.
The elderly man on the left in this picture can be easily mistaken for a great priest !!! No! He is Dr. C P. Mathew who was the Head of the Oncology Department at Kottayam Medical College and later principal. On the ‘right’ is Brahmashree Suryan Subramanian Bhattathiri.
Dr Mathew was the first oncology professor in Kerala, Head of the Oncology Department at Kottayam Medical College and then the principal. Later when he retired he was a flying doctor and visiting professor of allopathic cancer treatment at universities in more than 50 countries.
At the age of 60, he decided to unlearn everything he had learnt earlier and accepted a _Lada Vaidyan_ (a physician of traditional tribal medical system), whom he met on the street, as his guru.
Then this great doctor saved tens of thousands of cancer patients from death using the neo-pagan Siddha medicine he learned from the late _lada_ guru. Patients he saved include many rejects from the Mayo Clinic in America.
He was an in-depth student on Indian cultural texts, including the Vedas and the Upanishads. What’s more, he received the Upanayana from Suryakaladi Mana, famous for its “Tantric rituals” and spent the rest of his life as a Sanatana Dharma Acharya. Dr Mathew passed away on 20 Oct 2021 at the age of 92. No leading media in Kerala reported his death due to unknown reasons.
Go through this thread to know whom to vote Born at Thirthala on 12-06-1932, Sreedharan studied at Palakkad and finished engineering at Kakinada.Former CEC T N Sheshan was his classmate till intermediate. For a short period, Sreedharan worked as a lecturer in Civil engineering at the Government Polytechnic, Calicut and a year at the Bombay Port Trust as an apprentice. He joined Bharatiya Railways after clearing UPSC Exams in 1953. Bharat and Srilanka had a train service between them. Severe cyclone destroyed the services damaging infrastructure at Dhanushkodi and Pamban, while the Train to Srilanka never resumed, Pamban was made ready in a record time. The IR gave 6 months, Sreedharan’s boss gave 3 months and Sreedharan completed in 46 Days and received Railway Minister’s Award.
In 1970, as the deputy chief engineer, he was put in charge of the implementation, planning and design of the Calcutta metro, the first ever metro in Bharat. In 1975 Communists removed him as he didn’t approve their Disruption. He next joined Cochin Ship Yard in 1979 as CMD and in 1981 under his leadership MV Rani Padmini which was on paper for years saw its launch. He had promotions in IR and retired in 1990 as Member Engineering, Railway Board and ex-officio Secretary to the Govt of India.
Sreedharan couldn’t enjoy his retirement as Railway Minister George Fernandes appointed Sreedharan as CMD for Konkan Railway. Under Sreedharan,the company executed its mandate in 7 Yrs. It was the first major project in Bharat to be undertaken on a BOT (Build-Operate-Transfer) basis, the organisation structure was different from that of a typical Indian Railway set-up, the project had 93 tunnels along a length of 82 KM and involved tunnelling through soft soil. The total project covered 760 km and had over 150 bridges. That a public sector project could be completed without significant cost and time overruns was considered an achievement by many. (The result when 2 Honest Men Work Together) Konkan Railway has been covered in the Extreme Railways program by Chris Tarrant as 1 of the most difficult railway project to have been constructed in the world. His Next project was Delhi.Thanks to Ex CM Sahib Singh Verma. Sreedharan was particularly known for isolating his projects from political pressures and influences and for fast execution of projects. He had announced that he would retire by the end of 2005, but his tenure was further extended to oversee the completion of the second phase of Delhi Metro. After 16 years of service with the Delhi Metro. Sreedharan retired on 31 December 2011.
After his retirement from DMRC, Sreedharan joined as Principal Advisor of the Kochi Metro Rail Project.Initially, V S Achuthanandan led Communist govt tried to swallow money by calling Global Tenders, when Sridharan refused & subsequent opposition from all, he reversed his stand. Kochi metro was finally unveiled on 17 June 2017, it was considered a landmark event in India in terms of completion time, control systems used & initiatives such as employing transgender people, vertical gardening, respecting migrant labourers, and use of solar power.
Pope Benedict XVI’s statement on September 27, 2006 during a public audience, that the apostle St. Thomas only reached as far as North-West India—today’s Pakistan—was factually correct and reflected the statements of the Early Church Fathers and the geography of the Acts of Thomas. That the Pope’s minders changed his statement the next day on the Vatican website, to include South India in Thomas’s travels, is no surprise to us. Telling lies for Jesus and his Vicar in Rome are also very much part of Catholic Church tradition and history. – Ishwar Sharan
On 27 September 2006, Pope Benedict XVI made a speech in St. Peter’s Square at Vatican City in which he recalled an ancient St. Thomas tradition. He said that “Thomas first evangelised Syria and Persia and then penetrated as far as western India, from where Christianity also reached South India”.[1] This statement greatly upset the Indian bishops in Kerala, and as it was perceived to be a direct violation of the beliefs of many Indian Christians, it was brought to the attention of the Pope’s editors and amended the next day on the Vatican’s website to read that St. Thomas himself had reached South India. G. Ananthakrishnan’s article “Thomas’s visit under doubt” in the Times of India, 26 December 2006, reads:
His reluctance to believe what fellow disciples said about Jesus Christ’s resurrection earned him the name Doubting Thomas. Centuries later, St Thomas—believed to be the man who brought Christianity to India—finds himself in the shadow of ‘doubt’ with none other than the Pope contradicting his evangelical trek in the country, only to modify it a few days later. But far from dousing the fire, the Pope has rekindled a debate and given critics an issue on the platter.
Pope Benedict XVI made the statement at the Vatican on September 27, 2006. Addressing the faithful during the Wednesday catechises, he recalled that St. Thomas first evangelised Syria and Persia, and went on to western India from where Christianity reached Southern India. The import of the statement was that St. Thomas never travelled to south India, but rather evangelised the western front, mostly comprising today’s Pakistan.
Knowingly or unknowingly, he had in one stroke challenged the basis of Christianity in India and demolished long-held views of the Church here that St Thomas landed in Kerala, where he spread the gospel among Hindus. The comments were especially a letdown for the Syrian Christians of Kerala, who proudly trace their ancestry to upper-caste Hindus said to have been evangelized by St Thomas upon his arrival in 52 AD.
The comments went unnoticed until Sathya-Deepam, the official mouthpiece of the Syro-Malabar church, picked it up. Writing in it, George Nedungat, a member of the Oriental Pontifical Institute of Rome, conveyed the community’s anguish and claimed that previous popes had recognised St. Thomas’s work in south India.
The Pope’s original statement given out at St. Peter’s, before it was amended on the Vatican website, was factually correct and reflected the geography of the Acts of Thomas, i.e. Syria, Parthia (Persia/Iran) and Gandhara (Afghanistan, North-West Pakistan). There is no historical evidence to support the tradition that St. Thomas came to South India, and on 13 November 1952 Vatican officials sent a message to Kerala Christians stating that the landing of St. Thomas at Muziris (Cranganore now Kodungallur) on 21 November 52 AD was “unverified”. When this writer sought confirmation of the 1952 Vatican statement in 1996, the Vatican’s reply was disingenuous and non-committal. The Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints said that he needed more information and that the life of St. Thomas was the object of historical research and not within his congregation’s competence.[2]
Earlier, in 1729, the Bishop of Madras-Mylapore had doubted whether the tomb in San Thome Cathedral was that of St. Thomas and wrote to the Sacred Congregation of Rites in Rome for clarification. Rome’s reply was never published and we may assume it was a negative reply. Again, in 1871 the Roman Catholic authorities at Madras were “strong in disparagement of the special sanctity of the localities [viz. San Thome, Little Mount, and Big Mount identified by the Portuguese after 1517] and the whole story connecting St. Thomas with Mailapur.” However, in 1886 Pope Leo XIII stated in an apostolic letter that St. Thomas “travelled to Ethiopia, Persia, Hyrcania and finally to the Peninsula beyond the Indus”, and in 1923 Pope Pius XI quoted Pope Leo’s letter and identified St. Thomas with “India”. These papal statements also reflect the geography of the Acts of Thomas, as does Pope Benedict’s statement, and make no reference to South India. In fact, the India they refer to is now Pakistan.
Pope John Paul II visited India twice in 1986 and 1999 and prayed at the alleged tomb of St. Thomas in San Thome Cathedral, but, like St. Francis Xavier before him, he had nothing to say about St. Thomas’s visit to South India or Mylapore in the first century. This is a curious omission on the Pope’s part in that he was an ardent missionary who openly promoted the evangelising of India and Asia, and a statement from him confirming a visit by St. Thomas to South India would have certainly supported his agenda and that of his Indian bishops.
1. As quoted in Deccan Chronicle, Chennai, of 23 November 2006, under the title “Pope angers Christians in Kerala”.
2. Our letter to the Prefect, Sacred Congregation of Rites, Vatican City, dated 26 August 1996, read: “I am doing research on St. Thomas in India and have learned that your office issued a letter on November 13, 1952 which stated that the landing of St. Thomas at Cranganore in 53 AD is unverified. I would like to know if in fact the said letter was issued and, if that is not the case, whether you can confirm that St. Thomas was martyred and buried in Madras. I would be most grateful if you could direct me to any authentic evidence supporting the story of St. Thomas in India.” The reply from the Prefect, Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints, Rome, dated 11 September 1996, read: “This Congregation for the Causes of Saints has received your letter of 26th August last in which you have asked for information regarding Saint Thomas’ presence in India. We have not found in our Archives the letter supposedly written by this Congregation on 13th November 1952, of which you speak, because of a lack of more precise data (Diocese, destination, etc.). Nor do we have other data regarding Saint Thomas since this Archive was begun in 1588. His life is the object of the research of historians which is not the particular competence of this Congregation.” This reply was a brush off. The Prefect knew what we were asking for and could have located the 1952 Vatican letter in a few minutes if he wished to.
Arise Bharat 