Another sleepless, but educational night: I started reading “Essentials of Hinduism”. The book is written by a guru who lives in the U.S.A. with intention to give an overview of Hindu religion to western people, but also to address some misconceptions they may have about Indian society and tradition. As far as I can tell after some 80 pages he is pretty successful in the former, but the latter is a bit overdone, because picture he gives is painted mostly with bright colors, emphasizing good sides, and giving very little space to the bed ones (for these I would point to “The Age of Kali”). Overall, it looks like a pretty good and systematic introduction to Hinduism. It already enlightened me on a few things.

Holy cows, for example. I learned that there is no such a thing. Cows have been considered extremely valuable because of the milk they give and since they live as a part of a household, they have a special place in the society. They are considered to be noble and very useful animals, like horses are in the West, and that's where the reluctance to eat their meat comes from. In general, because of the principle of non-violence toward any form of life (some even go so far to eat only roots in order to avoid killing plants) Hindus are encouraged to eat vegetarian food, but they are not banned from eating meat.