MSU Red Cedar Message Board

i guess i'm the only one who saw the irony in laughing at the blogger's understanding of america while also discussing living conditions in india based on a few photos.

Do they still charge "pathkaar" (foreigners) close to $15 to enter? Maybe they are actually using the money for improvements - I figured it was probably being siphoned off into some government slush fund.

They do charge more for foreign tourists, but it's still very cheap.

I'm Indian...

I've been americanized because of AccSpartan!

A few more:

1) School band somewhere far up in HP
2) Same village in HP
3) Meeting the townfolk on the mayor's rooftop

Nevermind. I've been drinking and didn't notice that this thread was four months old.

I was just going to copy and post this!

Boy, good thing I dont live in America where the police will shoot me dead if I dont raise my hands. Good lord......

Our country is horrific sometimes, but what I just saw in those pictures is beyond disturbing......

How many women are burned to death per year, literally, for not making good on dowry?

Is it true in India that rats are respected, and run rampant everywhere, like inside churches and the like

I love butter chicken

Gross

Actually, according to this story, rats do have special reverance in India. And this is widespread.

1994 AP story:

It is a health official's nightmare: tens of thousand of rats racing across the floor, feasting on fruit and candy.

At the Karni Mata temple in the desert state of Rajasthan, the effort to stifle the first outbreak of plague in 28 years takes a back seat to an old Hindu practice -- rat worship.

The marble floored temple, one of India's most famous shrines, is one of many sites where rats are worshipped and fed as they breed and breed and breed.

Many of the rats leap onto platform where food has been placed under a golden umbrella by worshippers, while priests chant hymns and play cymbals.

In Hindu mythology, the elephant-headed god Ganesh is accompanied by rat wherever he travels. No Hindu worship is complete without an offering to Ganesh and his small companion.

During 1940s and early 1950s, plague routinely killed thousands of Indians each year because the impoverished nation has no real health-care program.

"This nonsense had to stop", said Klomesh Chandra Dev, a retired government official, who started a neighborhood campaign to kill rats in New Delhi. "The time has come for people to realize that it is either us or the rat."

Even at Indian airports, few staffers are willing to kill rats. Last year Air India. India's international carrier, postponed three flights to Tokyo, New York and London after rats were found in the cockpit of each plane. The airline was concerned that rats might have damaged control panel wiring.

In the eastern metropolis of Calcutta, Hindu residents still flock to city park to feed the tens of thousands of rats
that live there.

Though rats infest much of India, including cities, shanty towns and farms (where they eat nearly one-quarter of the produce), Hindus rarely kill rats.

"I do drop a rat when I see one in my kitchen, but I can never kill it," said Amita Roy, a resident of Vasant Kunji section of New Delhi. "It is a sin to kill the companion of our God."

At daybreak in many towns, villages and cities, Indian men and women are seen carrying rats in traps and releasing them
at a distance from their homes. Rarely one is killed.

In the Rajasthan rat temple, when rats are occasionally trampled to death by accident the errant worshipper is required to offer a lifesize rat made of gold at the shrine.

In 1993, authorities bought rat traps after their bamboo jungles of northeastern India were overrun. The rats were eating flowering bamboo, threatening the livelihood of 2,700 tribal families in the Arunachal Pradesh.

Unlike the Hindus, some of India's tribespeople eat rats -- roasting them and sprinkling them with spices. The 30,000 people of the Irula tribe once lived in forests in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, hunting small game, gathering roots and berries, and eating rats they could catch.

Not many people expect the plague to change the age-old tradition of rat worship in India. But the deadly disease is beginning to make some Indians wonder: Is it good to worship a potential killer?

How The Rats Became Holy (http://judypat.com/india/karnimata.htm)

The story goes that Karni Mata once tried to restore the dead child of a storyteller back to life but failed because Yama, the god of death, had already accepted his soul and re-incarnated him in human form. Karni Mata, famed for her legendary temper, was so inflamed by her failure that she announced that no one from her tribe would fall into Yama's hands again. Instead, when they died, all of them would temporarily inhabit the body of a rat before being reborn into the tribe. Therefore, the rats are considered to be incarnations of storytellers and are much revered