Wisdom Quarterly: American Buddhist Journal: Angry Indian Goddesses, saving India's forest, going to Cuba, undercover in Saudi Arabia...

PRI's The World; Crystal Quintero, CC Liu, Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly; PBS (Frontline)

Bollywood in Hollywood: Los Angeles hosts the 2016 Indian Film Festival April 6-10.

"Angry Indian Goddesses" official trailer, a Pan Nalin film at Indian Film Festival, Los Angeles

These Indian women protect forests better than men. The village men agree.

Even the monsoon rains don’t keep the women of Ghunduribadi, a tiny tribal village in India’s eastern state of Odisha (Orissa), from patrolling the nearby forest at dawn.

Clad in colorful saris and armed with sticks and machetes, they file in the rain through rice fields and onto a muddy path that leads into 500 acres of wooded hills in the Nayagarh district. They’re looking for intruders that come to cut down their trees without permission.

Women's patrol nabbed three illegal loggers from nearby village and brought them to the local council. If not for the presence of reporter, they would've beaten the men (Sam Eaton).

Not long ago these women would have been considered trespassers here. Nearby, there are heavy stone markers laid down by the British in the 1800s when the government declared this forest its own.

But now, under India’s landmark 2006 Forest Rights Act, tribal villages like Ghunduribadi can claim title to their ancestral lands, some 150,000 square miles of forest all across India. That’s an area almost the size of California, making it one of the largest land reforms in India’s history. More