Thursday, March 30, 2006

Rice & Daal Again?

In the spirit of honey-what's-for-dinner, I offer this tasty little morsel:

AHMEDABAD, India (Reuters) - A jobless alcoholic burned himself to death after his wife refused to serve him meat for dinner, Indian police said Sunday. Sixty-year-old Mithailal Ram Sanjivan doused his body with an inflammable liquid and set himself ablaze outside his one-room house in Ahmedabad, the main city of western Gujarat state. Police said the victim, who had been without a job for years, and his wife, Geeta Sanjivan, 54, had a scuffle over the dinner menu. The wife refused to cook meat as they could not afford it. Irritated by this, Sanjivan locked her in the house before setting himself on fire outside.

How to respond? Do I express horror and outrage, try to crawl inside the head of one driven to such excesses of violence? Or should I state the obvious and express relief that he didn't kill his wife as well - and hope to Agni (Hindu god of fire) that she doesn't respond by performing suttee in what would have been a double weenie roast. I could anticipate Brother of Cat in Rabat's response to this posting and, paraphrasing Dickens, say that if he were to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Perhaps the world is no worse off without him.

Too bad Geeta hadn't tossed Mithailal on the barbie years ago, but kudos to her for having the moral fibre (lots of fibre in lentils) to stand up to this fuckwit. At the risk of sounding insensitive (there's a reason why I'm not a social worker), I suspect that ol' Mithailal wasn't a whole barrel of laughs to have moping around the house. Hope she remembered to bring the marshmallows.

Addendum: My husband has reminded me that marshmallows aren't vegetarian - although clearly, the Sanjivans weren't vegetarian as Mithailal was hankering for some sirloin. So don't forget kids: there are meat byproducts in marshmallows. Marshmallows therefore are bad, unless you get the veggie kind.

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