To honour Mahatma Gandhi's birthday and mark World Vegetarian Day, members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) India's youth arm, petaDishoom, will join with the World Alliance for Youth Empowerment (WAYE), which is the youth arm of H H Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's Art of Living and ProSoya Foods, as well as hundreds of concerned citizens in Pune on Tuesday with a vital message: go vegetarian! The demonstrators will congregate in a field and position their bodies to form the words "Go Veg". Then, wearing animal masks and holding signs and banners emblazoned with pro-vegetarian messages, they will march towards Sambhaji Park on Junglee Maharaja Road. petaDishoom has tied up with College Of Engineering Pune’s Technical Fest, Mindspark 2008 for the March for Animals.

The makers of Staeta soya milk – a healthy and humane alternative to cows' milk, which is often adulterated and cruelly obtained – will provide soya milk to the participants:

Date: Tuesday, 30 September

Time: 12 noon

Place: Boys Hostel, College of Engineering, Pune, Shivaji Nagar

As Gandhiji said, "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the ways its animals are treated". Today, India would not want to be judged by the treatment of chickens and cows raised and killed for food. The animals are confined to filthy sheds, or tabelas, and they are denied everything which is natural and important to them. Their slaughter is crude, terrifying and often painful, and they are sometimes dismembered while they are still conscious.

Eating animals is also bad for your health and the environment. Consumption of meat and other animal products has been conclusively linked to strokes, heart disease, diabetes, obesity and some types of cancer. And a recent UN report concluded that raising animals for food causes more of the greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming than all the cars, trucks, trains, ships and planes in the world combined.

PETA and ProSoya Foods, the makers of Staeta soya milk, have had a long and happy partnership. When the company began marketing Staeta soya milk in 2004 and sought vegans' support, PETA was the first vegan organisation to try out the product. PETA endorsed Staeta's superior taste and nutrition value and urged its members to give the product their wholehearted support.

In 2005, ProSoya Foods and Staeta won PETA's Proggy Award for the Best Soya Milk Company. Both PETA and Staeta have organised several road shows across India to spread awareness of animal suffering and the availability of soya milk as a dairy alternative.

"[Soya milk] is more than an issue of nutrition in a country where more than 70 per cent of people cannot digest lactose, the milk sugar present in dairy milk and its products", says N Jagirdar, ProSoya Foods' vice president of marketing. "There is also the larger issue of animal welfare and of assisting people to inflict no harm to our fellow creatures who inhabit this Earth with us. That's why ProSoya and PETA are working together to raise awareness in peoplefor aharmonious co-existence with animals. Soymilk is a healthy and nutritious alternative to dairy milk to other seekers of good health”

As the youth branch of The Art of Living Foundation, WAYE states that its mission is to work "towards empowering young people physically, spiritually, economically and socially for enabling their participation and leadership towards taking active responsibilities to work towards contemporary issues and challenges facing their communities and societies at large". When asked his thoughts on vegetarianism, Khurshed Batliwala, director of WAYE, quipped, "I don't eat my pets – why do you?"

"Gandhiji would be saddened to see how the millions of animals who are killed for food are treated in our country, and the simplest and easiest formula to Gandhigiri is to give up eating animals", says Simran Kodesia, PETA India's youth marketing coordinator. "It's a fact: the best thing you can do for your health, animals and the Earth is to go vegetarian."

.For more information, please visit petaDishoom.com.

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