Presented below is the story that shocked the world on September 21, 1995 - the day when the Murtis of Ganesh Ji around the world started to accept milk that was offered.  The attached video clip was filmed on this auspicious day and is now viewable  on  the website. If you ever feel down, lets this be a reaffirmation of your faith and your belief in Sanatan Dharma.

The Supernatural Event of This Century Is Experienced Simultaneously Worldwide
It all began on September 21st 1995 when an otherwise ordinary man in New Delhi dreamed that Lord Ganesha, the elephant-headed God of Wisdom, craved a little milk. Upon awakening, he rushed in the dark before dawn to the nearest temple, where a skeptical priest allowed him to offer a spoonful of milk to the small stone image. Both watched in astonishment as it disappeared, magically consumed by the God. What followed is unprecedented in modern Hindu history. Within hours news had spread like a brush fire across India that Ganesha was accepting milk offerings. Tens of millions of people of all ages flocked to the nation's temples. The unworldly happening brought worldly New Delhi to a standstill, and its vast stocks of milk-more than a million liters-sold out within hours. Just as suddenly as it started in India, it stopped in just 24 hours.

But it was just beginning elsewhere as Hindus in India called their relatives in other parts of the world. Soon our Hinduism Today offices were flooded with reports from around the world.  Everywhere the story was the same. A teaspoonful of milk offered by touching it to Ganesha's trunk, tusk or mouth would disappear in a few seconds to a few minutes, not always, but with unprecedented frequency. Reuters news service quoted Anila Premji, "I held the spoon out level, and it just disappeared. To me it was just a miracle. It gave me a sense of feeling that there is a God, a sense of Spirit on this Earth." Not only Ganesha, but Siva, Parvati, Nandi and the Naga, Siva's snake, took milk.

This "milk miracle" may go down in history as the most important event shared by Hindus this century, if not in the last millennium. It has brought about an instantaneous religious revival among nearly one billion people. No other religion has ever done that before! It is as if every Hindu who had, say "ten pounds of devotion," suddenly has twenty.

Miracles witnessed by many people happen from time to time in Hinduism as in other faiths, but they're rare. As a young boy, the tenth-century saint, Nambi Ambar, made Lord Ganesha actually eat the offerings placed before Him. Saint Jnanesvara of Maharastra became famous 600 years ago for making a water buffalo recite the Vedas before a group of arrogant priests.

Naturally there are skeptics-10% of Hindus, according to our very unscientific poll, all of whom moved swiftly to distance themselves from the phenomenon. "Capillary action," coupled with "mass hysteria" is the correct explanation, concluded many scientists within a few hours. Aparna Chattopadhyay of New Delhi replied to these scoffers in a letter to the Hindustan Times: "I am a senior scientist of the Indian Agriculture Research Institute, New Delhi. I found my offerings of milk in a temple being mysteriously drunk by the deities. How can the scientists explain the copper snake absorbing the milk I offered with a spoon kept at a good distance away from it?" Scientific or not, gallons of milk were disappearing with hardly a trace. A leading barrister in Malaysia was dumfounded when he watched a metal Ganesha attached to an automobile dashboard absorb six teaspoons of milk. In Nepal King Birendra himself made offerings to the God. Deities in Kenya and other countries took gallons of milk while sitting in shallow metal trays with no drains.

The worldwide press coverage has been nearly as amazing as the miracle itself. Of course, the event dominated the news in India for days. But once it started outside of India, local and leading national papers, such as the New York Times and Washington Post in America, and the Financial Times in UK, had picked up the story. The international wire services Reuters and Associated Press carried a dozen articles a day on what had now been named the "Milk Miracle." Many in India are unaware of how warmly the western press embraced the miracle. In many countries reporters came to the temples and personally offered milk. Of course, they too would put forward a "scientific explanation" in their report, but many otherwise detached Western journalists shared their own joyful experience as a fact.

Ironically, the reporting inside India was a completely different matter. The English-language press in India with its Marxist-leaning political slant has never been a friend of Hinduism. Headlines heralded the attitude: "People go Berserk at `Milk Miracle';" "Scientists Dismiss it as Mass Hysteria," and "Milk-Drinking Deities Unleash Mass Hysteria, Scientists Ridicule Miracle Theory." Editorial writers, with logic even less plausible that that of the scientists, claimed it was all a plot by the BJP and VHP to win the next elections. Every attempt continues in Bharat's press to break devotees' renewed faith and dismiss the entire event as a form of universal insanity-and a waste of good milk to boot.

Not every Indian paper was so negative: Tunku Varadarajan of The Times expressed his concern that, "Modern Hindus are often all too apologetic about the apparent angularities in the beliefs of their countrymen. In this, secular Indians are in danger of denying the very logic which has allowed India to be secular in the first place. If that tolerance is now under strain, the blame lies in part with those who would regard as dangers any celebrations of the country's underlying Hindu identity."

Hinduism has its own science to apply to this miracle, that of the interpretation of portents-unusual or supernatural events. Portents are the specific domain of astrologers to interpret, and coincidentally most of this issue of Hinduism Today is devoted to astrology. The "milk miracle," under this analysis, is not the end in itself, but rather signals a future event of great import.

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