A World Outraged

Just now I got some threat messages from right-wing Christian groups for having published my last blog. They objected to the word psalm, but I didn't get an opportunity to tell them that a psalm means a sacred song or a hymn and it has NO reference to the book of The Holy Bible whatsoever. So I will change it to a shloka. Does a shloka, by virtue of being a Sanskrit word, become a Hindu term? Can't there have been Christian shlokas in The Holy Bible?

And then some women pointed out that clicking a picture like that was very objectionable and that they will take me to court for having outraged their modesty publicly like this.

Mallika Sarabhai* called to say that the subject is fat and thus by putting up a picture of someone's fat ass I have outraged the aesthetic sensibilities of bloggers and online joggers. Mallika actually believes obese people hurt our aesthetic sensibilities. I silently agree with her, but then, for the fear of brickbats from expected and unexpected quarters, I publicly disagree with her. What utter nonsense, I say!

The Muslim waqf board has expressed its utter disgruntlement at this picture being clicked at a kabab joint run by Muslims. I fail to see the connection here, but then...

The Hindus were the most noisy of all. And this is the group that came up with a variety of conflicting viewpoints, much like their conflicting gods at loggerheads with each other. First, a group claimed that me being a Hindu, I should have elaborated on that hand in the picture. They feel it can belong to anybody from Durga (who has ten arms) to Kartik (who has four). Closer inspection of the picture, they further said, revealed that it was a male arm, and because Ganesha has fat arms, this arm definitely belongs to Kartik. They now want to perform kar seva at the Muslim kabab joint because they feel it was Kartik's original birthplace. Another group of Hindus (and their leader calls himself Mr Mutalik) asked me about the identity of the woman in question and are out looking for her for not having worn a sari to a public place. I pointed out to them that she isn't wearing a pink chaddi either, but that must have further outraged them.

The last threat was from Israel. They want to know why a falafal is being called a shwarma roll, why Muslims have not paid any royalty for having stolen their recipe of a falafal, and why there is no hummus used if it is a falafal after all. When I told them that these rolls indeed have hummus in them, they filed a lawsuit against the Muslim kabab center at the International Court of Justice for damages to their intellectual property rights.

The only congratulatory mails have come from some really fat, mid-Western Americans. I wonder why.

*Mallika Sarabhai, to serve your short memories, is a famous danseuse and twenty times better looking than Mallika Sherawat. It wasn't a typo.