Indira Somani
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This is a 65 foot statue of Lord Siva. I was kind of in shock when I saw it, because the entrance to this place felt like a hidden path from a busy street. You walk along this long corridor and through a handful of shops, and then all of sudden this giant statue of Lord Siva appears. It has a pretend backdrop of the Mount Kailash (Himalayan mountain) and a small body of water in front, which is supposed represent the Ganges river. This (Mount Kailash) is considered to be a place where Lord Siva resides and a place of eternal bliss. Construction of this statue began in 1994 and was completed in 1995. In 1996 Mount Kailash was installed and Lord Ganesha, which is at the entrance was installed in 1998. When you enter, you have the option of picking up 108 coins and dropping them in each bucket repeating the phrase Om Namah Shivaya. I opted to just go to the shrine of Shiva and start filmming. It’s a beautiful statue, and I’m glad I got to see it upon my second day of arriving in India. I hope to capture some unique temples on this journey.Categories
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Indira S. Somani, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Media, Journalism and Film at Howard University, Washington, D.C. Somani studies effects of satellite television on the Indian diaspora, specifically the generation of the Asian Indians who migrated to the U.S. between 1960 and 1972, and their media habits.
She has been published in the Howard Journal of Communication, Journal of Communication Inquiry, International Communication Research Journal, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, and the Asian Journal of Communication.
For the fall of 2011, Somani was awarded a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellowship to study the Western influence of Indian programming in India.
Somani is also an award winning independent producer and director of documentaries. Her most recent production, Life on the Ganges (2016), is a 10- minute documentary short about the life of one boatman, who rows tourists along the Ganges River in Varanasi, India, particularly around Dev Diwali when people from all over India travel there to bathe in the Ganges to wash away their sins and purify their souls. The film has been screening in film festivals all over the U.S.
Another production, Crossing Lines (2007), is a personal essay 30-minute documentary about her struggle to stay connected to India after the loss of her father, and about how Asian Indians maintain and preserve their cultural identity. The film has won numerous awards, screened in film festivals nationally and internationally, screened on PBS affiliates, and has also been distributed to more than 100 university libraries in the U.S. through New Day films.
Somani brings 10 years of broadcast journalism experience as a television news producer to the classroom, most notably with CNBC and WJLA-TV, the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C. She has been a leader of the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA), where she has also won several “Outstanding” awards on her coverage of South Asians in North America.
Prior to joining Howard University, Somani was an Assistant Professor of Journalism at Washington and Lee University (Lexington, VA) and American University’s School of Communication (Washington, DC). Somani earned her Master’s in Journalism from the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University in 1993, and her Ph.D. from the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland, College Park in May 2008.