George Bush & George W. Bush: Hunting Father and son spend some time bonding.

I liked the slapping bit :)

Raj Fuckeray

Check out yet another interview with stupid answers of our friend Raj Thackeray. In one of the answers he says

I read the order only a day later. It’s not that I disrespect the law. Joshi runs many institutes across the state, and if I had wanted, we could have created problems at most of them.

and right in the next he says

If you read the guidelines, it says that shopkeepers should have signboards in Marathi. The law has to be complied with.

I need to say this to Raj and Bala Fuckeray that the marathi manus is better off without you and your regressive politics and routine violation of law. You guys are scumbags of the highest order with brains made of cow dung which according to you is holy but unfortunately does not make very good material for intellectual development in humans.

Jet reinstates all sacked employees

Breaking news of the night: Naresh Goyal purports to have fathered 1900 full grown children in a single night under zero political pressure. Does he really want us to believe that he decided to take back the sacked employees because he could not sleep at night?

Update: Rediff: 'Sacked' Jet Air staffers taught Marathi lessons

Canonisation, Amitabh and News

It is canonisation time over in Pope-dom. The funny thing is that the Pope himself is involved in the process of the Vatican rubber stamping the sainthood of a person. The person can then be offically worshipped without fear of persecution from the officials of course :)

I say, the process is kind of bureaucratic, ain't it? I will stretch it further and say that it is also very elitist :) Why should the church decide who is a saint and who is not?

Over in our land of Hindustan our daily lives are governed by bureaucracy but not our religion, you see! The Hindus are empowered! We can start worshiping whoever we want to. Everyone and everything is valid game.

We have gods and also goddesses. (Yes really we are quite an equal society that way when it comes to the male vs female thing nevermind the issues of skewed sex ratios though.)

We even worship stand alone human organs, genitals to be precise. We maintain equality of the sexes in this too, worshiping both the male and the female organs.

Sometimes we absorb Gods from other religions too by simply declaring the other God to be an incarnation of one of our Gods as in the case of the Buddha.

The really crazy amongst us have temples even for film stars.

Although I am an atheist, I feel this is where Hinduism beats the crap out of the monotheistic religions. We can deify almost anything when it comes to God and it fits well in our religion's (thankfully loose) framework. Regardless of the merit in worshiping someone in Hinduism it is ok for common people to canonize a person of their wish be it Amitabh Bachchan or a obscure sadhu baba.

And it is only fit that if we can idolize Amitabh as a God, it is also the duty of our news channels to report over-enthusiatically throughout the day if the God has a stomach ache.

PS: There is no restriction on who is worthy of deification althought there are cases where who can worship has created controversies e.g. we have sexist temples that do not like fertile women as worshipers over at Sabrimala. The website title says

Sabarimala-The pilgrimage is a symbol of love, equality, and devotion

with the following paragraph in the main page to justify the equality

Unlike certain Hindu temples, Sabarimala temple has no restrictions of caste or creed. The temple is open to males of all age groups and to women who have either passed their fertility age and those before reaching the stage of puberty.

Their definition of equality is just a bit different.. all are equal.. but if you are a fertile woman, tough luck, our equality function is not defined over your set.

Sister Alphonsa is now "officially" a saint

The big news is out that the nun from Kerala, Sister Alphonsa, is now a saint. News channels that otherwise do not consider milk-drinking idols worthy enough of being a miracle (and their coverage) are happily lapping up the news.

It seems that the reporters conveniently fail to question the basis of the process of canonisation as spread of superstition. Seems like the official stamp of the head honcho of the Christian world suddenly converts a superstitious belief into a miracle (in this case the curing of a persons deformity). Even if we assume for a moment that miracles are possible, the bar for recognizing a miracle seems to be pretty low considering that the miracle involves curing just one person. My heart goes out to all medical researchers. They are just stupid suckers spending their lifetimes trying to find cures for our ills. Humanity should just shut the fuck up and reach out for the miracle medicine treatment that the Vatican seems to believe in so much.

I recommend just one small change in the process for canonisation based on medical miracles. The miracle treatment should be tried out by the Pope himself when he has trouble with his human body (that houses his saintly soul) and then if it works with him he should make it official. I bet the Vatican will not be too keen to take on a process that involves medical trials :)

No reporting on Amitabh's urine samples yet!

I am surprised that our 24x7 media has still not reported on whether the Amitabh's urine and stool samples were tested.. we (the breaking news consumers of this country) know about the x-rays but we want more gory details... tell us about the enema too perhaps, with when, why and "How are you feeling now sir?" interviews. Sigh! Our favourite channels have let us down again :(

How Bihar recovers from the floods is too mundane no?

Religulous

There is some pretty hilarious stuff out on religion recently. Checkout the trailer of Religulous



Waiting eagerly to watch it.

Previously..