As I start to write this morning we are sweating away after a "farm adventure" par excellence. Just after a high level Publishers Desk meeting in our high tech publications office, word arrived. "The new calf is lost! Last night Kamadenu gave birth and the little one ran away. The sevaks on their way to Ganga sadhana today say they heard him bawling nearby." "Ok everyone, we need a search party pronto!" So the whole publications team "saddled up" and hit the land, a 51 acre search, new born presume lying down somewhere. Forty-five minutes later, "No sightings, also, weird, no tracks! He must be very nearby" Yogi Yuganatha got one of our litte new cats: Chola and starting walking out the cement path just past the nursery. Chola kitty, loving to be taken for a walk, usually very quiet in your arms thinking "Oh how wonderful to have a personal human chauffeur to show me the sights, meow. . " suddenly started scratching and ran off. Yogi thinking "MMM she is telling me something. . ." stepped off the path off in the nearby grass our little new born Nandi was sleeping peacefully. Safe at last he's having mother's milk under the banyan.

Talk about sycronicity. . .I was fretting, as a good monk should, about overt participation in gossip. . .we got so many complaints in the first day on the job for the title "Hot News and Gossip," that there was a ground swell to remove the word gossip. . .after all, beneath our dignity, uncool, right? OK, are we flexible, is this a concensualacracy or what? What shall we call it? We monks all love to mess around in the kitchen when we can, even if we are not formally assigned to cooking duties. . .so at the morning Hinduism Today staff meeting our Managing editor, Sannyasin Arumugaswami asked if recipes would be OK (he's really into making Indian style pickles) for this daily column. . .everyone laughed, "Are you kidding?" I said, "But wait, recipes would be really great. Plus, do you think I can really come up with real hot news every day? Maybe somedays all we will have is some Hot Masala." Yes! that's it "Hot Masala." Hopefully soon we will get some real news on this page. . .remember you can make submissions on events happening anywhere in the world. As we get it together here we will also post some tiem that may never go to press, personal testimonials on little triumphs, health tips and of course: recipes. So send your hot masala to hotmasala@hindu.org.