Cows In India Quotes

India is constipated with a lot of humbug. Take religion. For the Hindu, it means little besides caste and cow-protection. For the Muslim, circumcision and kosher meat. For the Sikh, long hair and hatred of the Muslim. For the Christian, Hinduism with a sola topee. For the Parsi, fire-worship and feeding vultures. Ethics, which should be the kernel of a religious code, has been carefully removed.

India is beyond statement, for anything you say, the opposite is also true. It's rich and poor, spiritual and material, cruel and kind, angry but peaceful, ugly and beautiful, and smart but stupid. It's all the extremes.

... I like your Jesus ... there's no doubt he was a great sadhu, most likely trained in India, but you know, he was wrong about God. God is not a judgemental giant sitting up in heaven, it's a force within us all - we are light bulbs in the electrical system of the universe.

All pomp and show.” Anjali’s glare at the house would’ve exploded bricks if she’d had superhuman powers. “A fat cow needs a big barn.

You put cow dung on my face?’ ‘Every day religiously until you were three. Why else do you think your skin is so clear?

Fortunately she stopped the servants before the platters of cold meats left the house, sending them back to the kitchen where she had the ham and beef placed on separate plates, for the Hindi Christians despite their conversion would not eat cow and the Muslims would not eat pig. The Portuguese, of course, ate anything.

No," he said, "look, it's very, very simple ... all I want ... is a cup of tea. You are going to make one for me. Keep quiet and listen." And he sat. He told the Nutri-Matic about India, he told it about China, he told it about Ceylon. He told it about broad leaves drying in the sun. He told it about silver teapots. He told it about summer afternoons on the lawn. He told it about putting in the milk before the tea so it wouldn't get scalded. He even told it (briefly) about the history of the East India Company. "So that's it, is it?" said the Nutri-Matic when he had finished. "Yes," said Arthur, "that is what I want." "You want the taste of dried leaves in boiled water?" "Er, yes. With milk." "Squirted out of a cow?" "Well, in a manner of speaking I suppose ...

I love Canada. I miss the heat of India, the food, the house lizards on the walls, the musicals on the silver screen, the cows wandering on the streets, the crows cawing, even the talk of cricket matches, but I love Canada. It's a country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos.

Jinnah to Lord Mountabatten in one of his many meetings before partition: "India has never been a true nation. It only looks that way on the map. The cows I want to eat, the Hindus stops me from killing. Every time a Hindu shakes hands with me he has to wash his hands. The only thing the Muslim has in common with Hindu is his slavery to the British.

In India I've slowly been learning that I'm not in complete control of my life...

India is constipated with a lot of humbug. Take religion. For the Hindu, it means little besides caste and cow-protection. For the Muslim, circumcision and kosher meat. For the Sikh, long hair and hatred of the Muslim. For the Christian, Hinduism with a sola topee. For the Parsi, fire-worship and feeding vultures. Ethics, which should be the kernel of a religious code, has been carefully removed. Take

By the dim light of a lantern, they crossed the field toward the oak woods. Ned took the lead then, being more familiar with the nocturnal hazards of a meadow. With his guidance they avoided cow pats, thistles, sudden ditches, murky dark puddles, and an iron rake someone had left lying about just waiting for a comic moment.

To him who wisely sees, The Brahman with his scrolls and sanctities, The cow, the elephant, the unclean dog, The Outcast gorging dog's meat, are all one.

Why the ancient rishis selected the cow for apotheosis is obvious to me. The cow in India was the best comparison; she was the giver of plenty. Not only did she give milk, but she also made agriculture possible. The cow is a poem of pity; one reads pity in the gentle animal. She is the second mother to millions of mankind. Protection of the cow means protection of the whole dumb creation of God.

A man opposite me shifted his feet, accidentally brushing his foot against mine. It was a gentle touch, barely noticeable, but the man immediately reached out to touch my knee and then his own chest with the fingertips of his right hand, in the Indian gesture of apology for an unintended offence. In the carriage and the corridor beyond, the other passengers were similarly respectful, sharing, and solicitous with one another. At first, on that first journey out of the city into India, I found such sudden politeness infuriating after the violent scramble to board the train. It seemed hypocritical for them to show such deferential concern over a nudge with a foot when, minutes before, they'd all but pushed one another out of the windows. Now, long years and many journeys after that first ride on a crowded rural train, I know that the scrambled fighting and courteous deference were both expressions of the one philosophy: the doctrine of necessity. The amount of force and violence necessary to board the train, for example, was no less and no more than the amount of politeness and consideration necessary to ensure that the cramped journey was as pleasant as possible afterwards. What is necessary! That was the unspoken but implied and unavoidable question everywhere in India. When I understood that, a great many of the characteristically perplexing aspects of public life became comprehensible: from the acceptance of sprawling slums by city authorities, to the freedom that cows had to roam at random in the midst of traffic; from the toleration of beggars on the streets, to the concatenate complexity of the bureaucracies; and from the gorgeous, unashamed escapism of Bollywood movies, to the accommodation of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Tibet, Iran, Afghanistan, Africa, and Bangladesh, in a country that was already too crowded with sorrows and needs of its own. The real hypocrisy, I came to realise, was in the eyes and minds and criticisms of those who came from lands of plenty, where none had to fight for a seat on a train. Even on that first train ride, I knew in my heart that Didier had been right when he'd compared India and its billion souls to France. I had an intuition, echoing his thought, that if there were a billion Frenchmen or Australians or Americans living in such a small space, the fighting to board the train would be much more, and the courtesy afterwards much less. And in truth, the politeness and consideration shown by the peasant farmers, travelling salesmen, itinerant workers, and returning sons and fathers and husbands did make for an agreeable journey, despite the cramped conditions and relentlessly increasing heat. Every available centimetre of seating space was occupied, even to the sturdy metal luggage racks over our heads. The men in the corridor took turns to sit or squat on a section of floor that had been set aside and cleaned for the purpose. Every man felt the press of at least two other bodies against his own. Yet there wasn't a single display of grouchiness or bad temper

India is beyond statement, for anything you say, the opposite is also true. It’s rich and poor, spiritual and material, cruel and kind, angry but peaceful, ugly and beautiful, and smart but stupid. It’s all the extremes. India defies understanding,

Such golden discs were similar to the moon-discs worn by other members of the divine bovine family, including those donned by Hathor, the cow-goddess-mother of the sun god, Ra. While other religions have practiced similar venerations of cattle—most notably Hinduism and in India where the humped Zebu cow continues to be worshipped as the representative of Aditi,

We had fully confirmed the original work from India and had done it in exceptional depth. Let there be no doubt: cow’s milk protein is an exceptionally potent cancer promoter in rats dosed with aflatoxin. The fact that this promotion effect occurs at dietary protein levels (10-20%) commonly used both in rodents and humans makes it especially tantalizing—and provocative.

Hi Sarah (re Holy Cow) - I couldn't agree more! I am a Singaporean 'Indian' and the FILTH & confusion of India is unbelievable! - 66yrs after independence(I nearly died there myself). May I in support refer you to an article by Dr Sam Pitroda on overpopulation there which is the crux of the matter. If you would like to correspond, more than happy to. Kind Regards: George

Asif Ali maneuvers the gleaming Mercedes down the labyrinthine lanes of Old Kolkata with consummate skill, but his passengers do not notice how smoothly he avoids potholes, cows and beggars, how skilfully he sails through aging yellow lights to get the Bose family to their destination on time. This disappoints Asif only a little. In his six years of chauffeuring the rich and callous, he has realized that, to them, servants are invisible.

You’re either remarkable or invisible,” says Seth Godin in his 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow.1 As he elaborated in a Fast Company manifesto he published on the subject: “The world is full of boring stuff—brown cows—which is why so few people pay attention…. A purple cow… now that would stand out. Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing.”2 When Giles read Godin’s book, he had an epiphany: For his mission to build a sustainable career, it had to produce purple cows, the type of remarkable projects that compel people to spread the word. But this left him with a second question: In the world of computer programming, where does one launch remarkable projects? He found his second answer in a 2005 career guide with a quirky title: My Job Went to India: 52 Ways to Save Your Job.3 The book was written by Chad Fowler, a well-known Ruby programmer who also dabbles in career advice for software developers.

We entered the Taj Mahal, the most romantic place on the planet, and possibly the most beautiful building on earth. We ate curry with our driver in a Delhi street café late at night and had the best chicken tikka I’ve ever tasted in an Agra restaurant. After the madness of Delhi, we were astonished that Agra could be even more mental. And we loved it. We marvelled at the architecture of the Red Fort, where Shah Jahan spent the last three years of his life, imprisoned and staring across at the Taj Mahal, the tomb of his favourite wife. We spent two days in a village constructed specifically for tiger safaris, although I didn’t see a tiger, my wife and son were more fortunate. We noticed in Mussoorie, 230 miles from the Tibetan border, evidence of Tibetan features in the faces of the Indians, and we paid just 770 rupees for the three of us to eat heartily in a Tibetan restaurant. Walking along the road accompanied by a cow became as common place as seeing a whole family of four without crash helmets on a motorcycle, a car going around a roundabout the wrong way, and cars approaching towards us on the wrong side of a duel carriageway. India has no traffic rules it seems.

Gardening Work There was a man breaking up the ground, getting ready to plant, when another man came by, "Why are you ruining this land?" "Don't interfere. Nothing can grow here until the earth is turned over and crumbled. There can be no roses and no orchard without first this devastation. You must lance an ulcer to heal. You must tear down parts of an old building to restore it." So it is with the sensual life that has no spirit. A person must face the dragon of his or her appetites with another dragon, the life energy of the soul. When that's not strong, everyone seems to be full of fear and wanting, as one thinks the room is spinning when one's whirling around. If your love has contracted into anger, the atmosphere itself feels threatening, but when you're expansive and clear, no matter what the weather, you're in an open windy field with friends. Many people travel as far as Syria and Iraq and meet only hypocrites. Others go all the way to India and see only people buying and selling. Others travel to Turkestan and China to discover those countries are full of cheats and sneak thieves. You always see the qualities that live in you. A cow may walk through the amazing city of Baghdad and notice only a watermelon rind and a tuft of hay that fell off a wagon. Don't repeatedly keep doing what your lowest self wants. That's like deciding to be a strip of meat nailed to dry on a board in the sun.

Once upon a time the dominant ethic toward domestic animals, rooted in the demands of husbandry and responding to the fundamental problem of life feeding on sentient life, was not don’t eat (of course), but neither was it don’t care. Rather: eat with care. (...) The eat with care ethic lived and evolved for thousands of years. It became many different ethical systems inflected by the diverse cultures in which it appeared: in India it led to prohibitions on eating cows, in Islam and Judaism it led to mandates for quick slaughter, on the Russian tundra it led Yakuts to claim the animals wanted to be killed. But it was not to last. The eat with care ethic didn’t become obsolete over time, but died suddenly. It was killed, actually.

This never would have happened in India. In India they understood that life unfolded the way it unfolded, whether you liked it or not: the cow in the road, the swerve that saves or kills you. One life ended, a new one began, maybe it was better than the last one, maybe it wasn't. The Indians (and the Thais, and the Sri Lankans) accepted this the way they accepted monsoons or the heat, with a resignation that was like simple good sense. Damned Americans. Americans, unschooled in the burning dung heaps and the sudden swerves, Americans couldn't help but cling tightly to the life they were living like clutching a spindly branch that was sure to break … and when things didn't go quite as expected, Americans lost their shit. Himself included.

Fortunately, getting hold of people’s garbage was a cinch. Indian detectives were much luckier than their counterparts in, say, America, who were forever rooting around in people’s dustbins down dark, seedy alleyways. In India, one could simply purchase an individual’s trash on the open market. All you had to do was befriend the right rag picker. Tens of thousands of untouchables of all ages still worked as unofficial dustmen and women across the country. Every morning, they came pushing their barrows, calling, “Kooray Wallah!” and took away all the household rubbish. In the colony’s open rubbish dump, surrounded by cows, goats, dogs and crows, they would sift through piles of stinking muck by hand, separating biodegradable waste from the plastic wrappers, aluminium foil, tin cans and glass bottles.

The technological efficiency of daughter-proofing a pregnancy may make it seem as if the girl shortage is a problem of modernity, but female infanticide has been documented in China and India for more than two thousand years.119 In China, midwives kept a bucket of water at the bedside to drown the baby if it was a girl. In India there were many methods: “giving a pill of tobacco and bhang to swallow, drowning in milk, smearing the mother’s breast with opium or the juice of the poisonous Datura, or covering the child’s mouth with a plaster of cow-dung before it drew breath.” Then and now, even when daughters are suffered to live, they may not last long. Parents allocate most of the available food to their sons, and as a Chinese doctor explains, “if a boy gets sick, the parents may send him to the hospital at once, but if a girl gets sick, the parents may say to themselves, ‘Well, we’ll see how she is tomorrow.

A powerful example of this is seen in the first war of Indian independence, also known as the Sepoy Mutiny, of 1857. Indian soldiers—sepoys—serving in the British East India Company’s army rebelled when it became known that the bullets they were issued were greased in either tallow, derived from cows, or lard, from pigs—major offenses to the Hindu and Muslim soldiers, respectively. Mind you, this was not the British colonial overlords doing something offensive to the core cultural values of either group—for example, declaring Allah a false prophet or banning polytheistic worship. Virtually every culture on earth has food prohibitions, often pretty arbitrary ones meant to merely signal core values (kosher laws for Orthodox Jews, for example, revolve around zoological arcana about whether a species has a cloven hoof) but that eventually gain a huge power. Before it was over, the Sepoy Mutiny killed more than 100,000 Indians.

During the eighteenth century the Punjab was the scene of ceaseless turmoil between Sikhs and Moslems, and on January 7, 1761, at the battle of Panipat, the Sikhs were defeated. On their homeward march the victorious Moslems destroyed the holy city of Amritsar, blew up the Golden Temple with gunpowder, filled the sacred pool with mud, and purposely defiled the holy place by slaughtering a lot of holy cows within the temple enclosure. Although this happened in 1761, the Sikhs have neither forgotten nor forgiven it. When the Partition of India took place and Pakistan came into being, the dividing line passed between Amritsar and Lahore, leaving many thousands of Sikhs and Moslems on the wrong side of the line. In the scramble to get out of India and into Pakistan, great numbers of Moslems were killed by Sikhs. On the other hand, the Moslems who were already in Pakistan avenged themselves by slaughtering thousands of Sikhs who were trying to escape into India. How

From: Bernadette Fox To: Manjula Kapoor Oh! Could you make dinner reservations for us on Thanksgiving? You can call up the Washington Athletic Club and get us something for 7 PM for three. You are able to place calls, aren’t you? Of course, what am I thinking? That’s all you people do now. I recognize it’s slightly odd to ask you to call from India to make a reservation for a place I can see out my window, but here’s the thing: there’s always this one guy who answers the phone, “Washington Athletic Club, how may I direct your call?” And he always says it in this friendly, flat… Canadian way. One of the main reasons I don’t like leaving the house is because I might find myself face-to-face with a Canadian. Seattle is crawling with them. You probably think, U.S./Canada, they’re interchangeable because they’re both filled with English-speaking, morbidly obese white people. Well, Manjula, you couldn’t be more mistaken. Americans are pushy, obnoxious, neurotic, crass—anything and everything—the full catastrophe as our friend Zorba might say. Canadians are none of that. The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that’s how I fear Canadians. To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone’s ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don’t understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated as such. Yes, I’m done. If the WAC can’t take us, which may be the case, because Thanksgiving is only two days away, you can find someplace else on the magical Internet. * I was wondering how we ended up at Daniel’s Broiler for Thanksgiving dinner. That morning, I slept late and came downstairs in my pajamas. I knew it was going to rain because on my way to the kitchen I passed a patchwork of plastic bags and towels. It was a system Mom had invented for when the house leaks.

Aurobindo’s orientation has yielded important new insights into the thought of the Vedic seers (rishi), who “saw” the truth. He showed a way out of the uninspiring scholarly perspective, with its insistence that the Vedic seers were “primitive” poets obsessed with natural phenomena like thunder, lightning, and rain. The one-dimensional “naturalistic” interpretations proffered by other translators missed out on the depth of the Vedic teachings. Thus Sūrya is not only the visible material Sun but also the psychological-spiritual principle of inner luminosity. Agni is not merely the physical fire that consumes the sacrificial offerings but the spiritual principle of purifying transformation. Parjanya does not only stand for rain but also the inner “irrigation” of grace. Soma is not merely the concoction the sacrificial priests poured into the fire but also (as in the later Tantric tradition) the magical inner substance that transmutes the body and the mind. The wealth prayed for in many hymns is not just material prosperity but spiritual riches. The cows mentioned over and over again in the hymns are not so much the biological animals but spiritual light. The Panis are not just human merchants but various forces of darkness. When Indra slew Vritra and released the floods, he not merely inaugurated the monsoon season but also unleashed the powers of life (or higher energies) within the psyche of the priest. For Indra also stands for the mind and Vritra for psychological restriction, or energetic blockage. Aurobindo contributed in a major way to a thorough reappraisal of the meaning of the Vedic hymns, and his work encouraged a number of scholars to follow suit, including Jeanine Miller and David Frawley.2 There is also plenty of deliberate, artificial symbolism in the hymns. In fact, the figurative language of the Rig-Veda is extraordinarily rich, as Willard Johnson has demonstrated.3 In special sacrificial symposia, the hymn composers met to share their poetic creations and stimulate each other’s creativity and comprehension of the subtle realities of life. Thus many hymns are deliberately enigmatic, and often we can only guess at the solutions to their enigmas and allegorical riddles. Heinrich Zimmer reminded us: The myths and symbols of India resist intellectualization and reduction to fixed significations. Such treatments would only sterilize them of their magic.

After nearly two years of traveling India's spiritual supermarket I'm still a self-occupied, selfish, pathetic, pessimistic bitch who's dropped any faith at first sign that things aren't going well.

The Sikhs have shown me how to be strong, the Vipassana course taught me how to calm my mind, India's Muslims have shown me the meaning of surrender and sacrifice, and the Hindus have illustrated an infinite number of ways to the divine. But right now the Buddhist way of living attracts me the most. It complements my society's psychological approach to individual growth and development, my desire to take control and take responsibility for my own happiness and it advocates a way of living that encourages compassion and care.

Well madam, I will tell you one thing. You must listen. You are back in India for a good shaking. Here you will dance with death and be reborn. You will be a chameleon of karma and there are many guides to show you the way. You will search India's land of gods and find faith

I must find peace in the only place possible in India. Within.

The election campaign of 1951–2 was conducted through large public meetings, door-to-door canvassing, and the use of visual media. ‘At the height of election fever’, wrote a British observer, ‘posters and emblems were profuse everywhere – on walls, at street corners, even decorating the statues in New Delhi and defying the dignity of a former generation of Viceroys’. A novel method of advertising was on display in Calcutta, where stray cows had ‘Vote Congress’ written on their backs in Bengali.

Noon found me strolling about the ashram grounds, on to the grazing land of a few imperturbable cows. The protection of cows is a passion with Gandhi. “The cow to me means the entire sub-human world, extending man’s sympathies beyond his own species,” the Mahatma has explained. “Man through the cow is enjoined to realize his identity with all that lives. Why the ancient rishis selected the cow for apotheosis is obvious to me. The cow in India was the best comparison; she was the giver of plenty. Not only did she give milk, but she also made agriculture possible. The cow is a poem of pity; one reads pity in the gentle animal. She is the second mother to millions of mankind.

Could he leave all that? Could he ever really leave India? Would he ever be anything but an alien in any other country? With his head here, his heart in India and his skin set on fire by the gaze of strangers, could he ever leave forever the smell of woodsmoke and jasmine on a winter's night? The stars, often so many of them that there seemed a rainfall of light. And the night itself spread like a dark blue wanton. Dawn and the sun rising like an explosion of softness. A hundred ruins weeping silently amidst the thunder and dust of everyday life. The sheer bliss of being home, of walking the streets amidst littered scraps of humanity, amidst cows and garbage, yet totally content at being home, being where you belonged, where no man looked at you twice on the streets in question.

I hadn't then really noticed the Kashmiris. They did appear very different with their pale, long-nosed faces, their pherans, their strange language, so unlike any Indian language. They also seemed oddly self-possessed. But in the enchanting new world that had opened before me- the big deep blue skies and the tiny boats becalmed in vast lakes, the cool trout streams and the stately forests of chenar and poplar, the red-cheeked children at roadside hamlets and in apple orchards, the cows and sheep grazing on wide meadows, and, always in the valley, the surrounding mountains- in so private an experience of beauty it was hard to acknowledge the more prosaic facts of their existence; the dependence upon India, the lack of local industry, the growing number of unemployed educated youth.

The Marwaris with their economic might were at the forefront of bankrolling gaurakshini sabhas (cow protection associations) while the Yadavs took on the mantle of foot soldiers at the time of riots. Cow protection was also one of the pronounced goals of Gita Press, for which Kalyan was used as a vehicle with two special issues, Gau Ank(Issue on Cows) and Gau Seva Ank (Issue on Service to Cows), besides innumerable articles on cows in various issues of the journal. Poddar, along with Prabhudatt Brahmachari and Karpatri Maharaj, was instrumental in getting many slaughterhouses closed post 1947.

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At first, on that first journey out of the city into India, I found such sudden politeness infuriating after the violent scramble to board the train. It seemed hypocritical for them to show such deferential concern over a nudge with a foot when, minutes before, they’d all but pushed one another out of the windows. Now, long years and many journeys after that first ride on a crowded rural train, I know that the scrambled fighting and courteous deference were both expressions of the one philosophy: the doctrine of necessity. The amount of force and violence necessary to board the train, for example, was no less and no more than the amount of politeness and consideration necessary to ensure that the cramped journey was as pleasant as possible afterwards. What is necessary? That was the unspoken but implied and unavoidable question everywhere in India. When I understood that, a great many of the characteristically perplexing aspects of public life became comprehensible: from the acceptance of sprawling slums by city authorities, to the freedom that cows had to roam at random in the midst of traffic; from the toleration of beggars on the streets, to the concatenate complexity of the bureaucracies; and from the gorgeous, unashamed escapism of Bollywood movies, to the accommodation of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Tibet, Iran, Afghanistan, Africa, and Bangladesh, in a country that was already too crowded with sorrows and needs of its own. The real hypocrisy, I came to realise, was in the eyes and minds and criticisms of those who came from lands of plenty, where no-one had to fight for a seat on a train. Even on that first train ride, I knew in my heart that Didier had been right when he’d compared India and its billion souls to France. I had an intuition, echoing his thought, that if there were a billion Frenchmen or Australians or Americans living in such a small space, the fighting to board the train would be much more, and the courtesy afterwards much less.

Most religions seem to have decided pretty early on 'You know, we've go to do take action about that sex thing'. Somehow India too forgot the age of the Kama Sutra, Tantra and erotic carvings on temple walls. Even the Hare Krishnas try to tell us that Krishna was only spiritually making love to hundreds of cow girls at a time.   Nowadays it works like this: no one ever tells you the first thing

People who know nothing about India like to raise the subject of the holy cow as an example of the mysterious and inexplicable ways of the Mystic East. Because in America and Europe cows are seen as little more than milk factories and soon-to-be-steak-dinners; How typically superstitious for a country suffering from ,malnutrition and famine to prohibit the consumption of such an obvious food source.   The belief in reincarnation perhaps goes some way to explain the general vegetarianism of the Hindu (after all one could be eating one's own grandparents born again further down the food chain) but the real answer is far more practical: The cow is the only available animal to pull the plough in the countryside. To eat it would be suicide. Without the cow the field cannot be ploughed, nothing will then be able to be planted and the family loses its only source of income. Unless there be a passing purveyor of spare kidneys.   Most anthropologists now accept that most myth has its birth in a cradle of practicality. As such the vital role of the cow was elevated to the status of sacred. Drape a few garlands of marigolds around her neck and write her into a few adventures of the gods and Abracadabra - You've got a holy cow.   But

But logic never seems to get more than a few steps down the road in India before it stumbles into a pothole. While Vijay was happy enough to write off hundreds of millions of Muslims as sadists, he didn't seem to care enough to lift one finger to help the cow standing in front of us. She was busy spoiling potential clown acts by eating all the dropped banana skins on the street. But then while Vijay pontificated, she began to apply herself to the consumption of a plastic bag that had been dumped in the gutter. For some time the cows in Delhi and other Indian cities were found dead without any apparent cause of death. Upon investigative surgery it was found that their digestive systems had been clogged up with up to thirty kilos of plastic. Tens of thousands of evolution never required the cow to understand the difference between cabbage leaves and polythene. Until now.   But few Indian seem to see the incongruity of venerating the cow as the Holy Giver of Life and yet allowing her to die in pain by the roadside. Such a step would involve taking responsibility for the world around them. Perhaps it would even involve getting their hands dirty in work suitable only for the lower castes.

India is the land of the profound and the profane; a place where spirituality and sanctimoniousness sit miles apart. I

In 1956 a rather delicate assignment came my way. I visited Switzerland at the invitation of Nestle but with a very specific brief from the Ministry of Industries, Government of India. Industries and Commerce Minister, Manubhai Shah, wanted me to ask the executives at Nestle what they were up to in our country. Under the excuse of producing condensed milk, they were importing not just milk powder, but also sugar and the tin plate for the cans! On my arrival at the airport at Nestle’s headquarters at Vevey, a Nestle car, about a mile long, was waiting to whisk me off to the best hotel in town where they put me up. I met with Kreeber, one of their two managing directors, and some other officers. The discussions turned pretty heated. I told them that my government had given them a licence to set up a plant in India so that they would produce condensed milk from Indian milk, not from imported ingredients. The Managing Director told me that it was not possible to produce condensed milk from buffalo milk, which was available in India. I said to him, ‘If you don’t know how to make it, come to me. I will teach you because I believe we can make it out of buffalo milk. I know it is more complicated than making it from cow’s milk and there are problems, but they are not insurmountable problems.’ When I assured them that it could be done, they said that their experts would have to come and set up their plant. Then they wanted the entire share capital in their hands. In those days government allowed only 49 per cent share capital to foreigners; 51 per cent had to be Indian. Kreeber said they could not agree to that. So I showed them a way out of that too. I said that 49 per cent could be with Nestle Alimentana and 51 per cent could be owned by Nestle India and in this way the entire project could stay in their hands. I was, in fact, facilitating their entry here. Ultimately, the Director agreed to set up a plant in India. At this point I told him that they could bring in any number of foreign experts they liked but my government hoped that, in five years, Indians who would be trained for the purpose would replace these experts. Kreeber’s response to this was that the production of condensed milk was an extremely delicate procedure and they ‘could not leave it to the natives to make’. At this, I lost my temper. Getting to my feet, I thumped the table loudly and said: ‘Please remember that you are speaking to a damned “native”. If you are suggesting that even after five years of training, the “natives” are not fit to occupy any position of authority in Nestle you are insulting my country. My country knows how to do without you.’ And I stormed out of the meeting – which I hope was what any self-respecting Indian would have done.

Realgar was an orange pigment made out of arsenic that they stopped using because it was toxic. Vermilion was made of mercury, verdigris from a toxic copper compound. Ivory black was burned ivory, India yellow came from the urine of cows fed mango leaves, which, from what the kid could dig up, was bad for them. Smalt was just a blue that was hard to make.

It’s all about ‘We must strive, and we must win.’ Them bairns are taught their destiny is to rule the world. Look at the magnificent buildings we have here. Or d’ya remember the durbar to celebrate Queen Victoria as Empress of India—not that she came for it, mind. It works wonders in cowing the natives. But it only works because those ICS types, to a man, believe they’re doing good. They’re civilizing the world.

There are Bedouins in Arabia, Tuareg in North Africa, Somalis and Maasai in East Africa, Sami of northern Scandinavia, Gujjars in India, Yörük in Turkey, Tuvans of Mongolia, Aymara in the Andes. There are herds of sheep, goats, cows, llamas, camels, yaks, horses, or reindeer, with the pastoralists living off their animals’ meat, milk, and blood and trading their wool and hides.

In India, the rulers tacitly encourage cow vigilantism, rape, and mob violence because that is their tactic to divide people and continue in power,” Arun analyzed.

K.R. Malkani,63 the dedicated editor of the Organiser (who would go on to achieve the dubious honour of becoming the first man to be arrested during the Emergency), however, was not to be cowed. In the very next issue, he defiantly wrote: To threaten the liberty of the press for the sole offence of non-conformity to official view in each and every matter, may be a handy tool for tyrants but (is) only a crippling curtailment of civil liberties in a free democracy . . . A government can always learn more from bona fide criticism of independent thinking citizens than the fulsome flattery of charlatans.64

We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia – breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals – and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We get bitten by mosquitoes and ticks. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies. Everything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.

MOO Moo. MOO: One morning in 2012, commuters in Rayburn, Pennsylvania, got stuck in a traffic jam when a cow and a bull decided to have “relations” in the middle of a busy intersection. Police tried shooing them away, but, according to reports, “That just got the bull mad and it started to escalate.” Game officials arrived and steered the couple into a private trailer. MOO: In 2012 a cow named Sadhana and her “bullfriend” got married in a lavish wedding ceremony in Guradia, India. More than 1,500 guests attended. Reason for the wedding: Sadhana’s owners were unable to have children, so without a daughter to marry off, the well-to-do couple married off their cow. MOO: An 18-year-old thief wearing a full-body cow costume stole 26 gallons of milk from a Walmart in Garrisonville, Virginia, in 2011. Witnesses recalled seeing him exit the store “on all fours.” Hours later police apprehended the human cow “skipping down the sidewalk” in front of a nearby McDonald’s.

There are more restrictive rules for girls than for dogs, cats or cows. Everyone knows these common boundaries, ‘boundations’. These restrictions often continue through college and even till the day girls get married. Curfew hours range from 6 p.m. to 10.30 p.m. For Abhisha, 20, studying commerce, the curfew hour is still 6 p.m. or 6.30 p.m. She says wistfully, ‘I have a lot of dreams, like sometimes to hang out with my friends, but my mother and father allow nahin karte , they don’t allow it. Because they think it is not safe for women. I feel they won’t allow me sleepovers, so I never ask, I feel anxious that they might refuse. Hesitation hoti hai , there is hesitation.’ Once she hesitatingly asked her father permission to go somewhere and he did not allow her. She did not talk to her father for a year, but she did not defy him or fight back. She says, ‘Now I have let it go. It was something small. But it affected me a lot.

There was a time in India when the wealth of a person was estimated in terms of the number of cows he possessed. A cow was considered to be the greatest and the most coveted prize and invaluable regard that could be given to anybody.

Badāūnī unhappily attests that Brahmans introduced Sanskrit works that predicted Akbar’s rise to power as Vishnu’s avatar: Cheating imposter Brahmans . . . told [the king] repeatedly that he had descended to earth, like Ram, Krishan, and other infidel rulers, who, although lords of the world, had taken on human form to act on earth. For the sake of flattery, they presented Sanskrit poetry [shir-hā-yi hindi] allegedly uttered by tongues of sages that predicted a world-conquering padshah would arise in India. He would honor Brahmans, protect cows, and justly rule the earth. They wrote such nonsense on old papers and presented it to [the emperor]. He believed every word.65

Measures of Length To give a brief account of matters. In point of measurements, there is first of all the yojana (yu-shen-na); this from the time of the holy kings of old has been regarded as a day’s march for an army. The old accents say it is equal to 40 li; according to the common reckoning in India it is 30 li, but in the sacred books (of Buddha) the yojana is only 16 li. In the subdivision of distances, a yojana is equal to eight krosas (keu-lu-she); a krosa is the distance that the lowing of a cow can be heard; a krosa is divided into 500 bows (dhanus); a bow is divided into four cubits (hastas); a cubit is divided into 24 fingers (angulis); a finger is divided into seven barleycorns (javas); and so on to a louse (yuka), a nit (liksha), a dust grain, a cow’s hair, a sheep’s hair, a hare’s down, copper-water,315 and so on for seven divisions, till we come to a small grain of dust; this is divided sevenfold till we come to an excessively small grain of dust (anu); this cannot be divided further without arriving at nothingness, and so it is called the infinitely small (paramanu).

Village economy in India, as elsewhere in monsoonal Asia, augmented crops and handicrafts with stores of free goods from common lands: dry grass for fodder, shrub grass for rope, wood and dung for fuel, dung, leaves and forest debris for fertilizer, clay for plastering houses, and, above all, clean water. All classes utilized these common property resources, but for poorer households they constituted the very margin of survival. In an outstanding study of a contemporary Gujarati village struggling with seasonality and drought, Martha Chen has shown how decisive nonmarket resources and entitlements remain for laborers and small farmers. "Standard definitions of work, worker and income," she writes, "do not capture how poor households generate livelihoods." In the village of Maatisar, (which she visited during the severe drought of 1985-87) fully 70 percent of the fuel and 55 percent of the fodder requirements of the poor are provided from free sources. The forest and pasture commons, which altogether generate thirty-five different useful products, "not only serve as a buffer against seasonal shortages, but also contribute to rural equity." The British consolidated their rule in India by transferring control of these strategic resources from the village community to the state. "Among all the interventions into village society that nurtured the Anglo-Indian empire," David Ludden argues, "dividing public from private land stands out as the most important." Common lands - or "waste" in the symptomatic vocabulary of the Raj - were either transformed into taxable private property or state monopolies. Free goods, in consequence, became either commodities or contraband. Even cow dung was turned into a revenue source for Queen Victoria.