{"id":665520,"date":"2025-11-14T00:02:48","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T04:02:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/?p=665520"},"modified":"2025-11-14T01:09:47","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T05:09:47","slug":"corpus-christi-city-council-meeting-opens-with-hindu-mantras-in-sanskrit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/665520\/","title":{"rendered":"Corpus Christi City Council meeting opens with Hindu mantras in Sanskrit"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_665521\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-665521\" style=\"width: 800px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-665521 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/zed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"490\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-665521\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rajan Zed reading the invocation<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Hindu prayer opened the Corpus Christi City Council meeting in Texas on November 11, containing verses from world\u2019s oldest extant scripture.<\/p>\n<p>Distinguished Hindu statesman Rajan Zed delivered the invocation from ancient Sanskrit scriptures before the Corpus Christi City Council. After Sanskrit delivery, he then read the English interpretation of the prayers. Sanskrit is considered a sacred language in Hinduism and the root language of Indo-European languages.<\/p>\n<p>Zed, who is the President of Universal Society of Hinduism, recited from\u00a0Rig-Veda, the oldest scripture of the world still in common use; besides lines from\u00a0Upanishads\u00a0and\u00a0Bhagavad-Gita\u00a0(Song of the Lord), both ancient Hindu scriptures. He started and ended the prayer with \u201cOm\u201d, the mystical syllable containing the universe, which in Hinduism is used to introduce and conclude religious work.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_665522\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-665522\" style=\"width: 800px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-665522 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/zed1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"449\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-665522\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rajan Zed with Mayor Paulette M. Guajardo just before the prayer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Reciting from\u00a0Brahadaranyakopanishad, Rajan Zed said \u201cAsato ma sad gamaya, Tamaso ma jyotir gamaya, Mrtyor mamrtam gamaya\u201d; which he then interpreted as \u201cLead us from the unreal to the real, Lead us from darkness to light, and Lead us from death to immortality.\u201d Reciting from\u00a0Bhagavad-Gita, he urged the council members and others present to keep the welfare of others always in mind.<\/p>\n<p>Zed, a global Hindu and interfaith leader, has been bestowed with the World Interfaith Leader Award. Zed is\u00a0on the Advisory Board of The Interfaith Peace Project, Senior Fellow and Religious Advisor to Foundation for Religious Diplomacy, etc. He has been a panelist for \u201cOn Faith\u201d, a prestigious interactive conversation on religion produced by The Washington Post; and leads a weekly interfaith panel \u201cFaith Forum\u201d in a Gannett publication for over 14 years.<\/p>\n<p>Hinduism, oldest and third largest religion of the world, has about 1.2 billion adherents and moksh (liberation) is its ultimate goal. There are about 3.2 million Hindus in the USA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hindu prayer opened the Corpus Christi City Council meeting in Texas on November 11, containing verses from world\u2019s oldest extant scripture. Distinguished Hindu statesman Rajan Zed delivered the invocation from ancient Sanskrit scriptures before the Corpus Christi City Council. After Sanskrit delivery, he then read the English interpretation of the prayers. Sanskrit is considered a sacred language in Hinduism and the root language of Indo-European languages. Zed, who is the President of Universal Society of Hinduism, recited from\u00a0Rig-Veda, the oldest scripture of the world still in common use; besides lines&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":665521,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47748],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-665520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=665520"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":665524,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665520\/revisions\/665524"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/665521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=665520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=665520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=665520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}