Diwali (Round 2) - 10/19/17

Hi! Today was our 49th day of Global Semester, which means we have spent 7 weeks on this amazing journey.

We started off the day with another interfaith devotion; this morning was a Sufi performance. We once again had the opportunity to enjoy the loud and amazing Sufi music.


After devotion, we headed straight to our first lecture of the day which was on Sikhism. Throughout this lecture we learned that Sikhism is not an "ism" in the sense of Hinduism, rather Sikhism means "student of spirituality/life." We then moved into a rather theoretical discussion about where God is for various religions which led our professor, Dr Raminder Kaur, to the question: "If God is everywhere, where are you?". She informed us that in Sikhism we are space and God is inside us; this was a concept that was difficult for most of us to grasp.

After a short lunch break, we were back in the classroom for our afternoon lecture on Islam from Dr. Qadeer Khwaja. This lecture was particularly interesting as we were able to draw connections from our lectures on Islam at the American University of Cairo.

After another amazing "no spice" dinner (that still felt spicy to me) at HMI, we had our second round of Diwali celebrations. Some of us ventured out into the heart of the city to see the fireworks and the Hyderabad nightlife first hand, others took to the streets around HMI and saw some incredible fireworks and were even invited into a local's house to see their Diwali celebration, and the rest of us spent the night in HMI listening to the fireworks (that sounded more like cannons) and working on homework. We all had a great time celebrating Diwali!


-Ellie

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