God, schmod

The cows here. They are quite something. They are impossibly chilled. Doesn’t matter how busy the road gets, you can guarantee the cows will have an empty schedule. They are not in a rush. Takin’ their time. Ooh yes. Just walking. Sure. Standing? Heck, why not? Cars, rickshaws, bikes, people? I reckon. Bothered – nah!

How on earth do they survive? Obviously it helps that the cow is considered a sacred animal. And why sacred? Well, for start it is considered a god. Hinduism has three gods I understand. Mother, earth and cow.

Hang on a minute.

Mother? Mother is god. I thought god meant God. You know, God! GOD. Etc.

Perhaps I am being naively Christian in my thinking but something tells me that the experience of being a woman in India (with or without child) is not akin to the kind of existence the God that I’m textually acquainted with enjoys. For a start women have no power. That is a shitty God, one with no power.

Me: Hi, is that God?

God, covering face, getting a bit flustered and wondering why she’s even out of the house: No.

Me: Are you sure? But you have a child! You are a mother. You are GOD. No?

God: Yes, but.

Me: So you are God.

God: Wait, my husband is coming, he looks angry.

Me: But you are God. You are powerful. I know you. You could crush your husband with a twitch of your finger. Make a car fall on him or something.

God: You had better leave, he’ll batter us both. Does getting beaten every night count as powerful?

Me: Er, no.

So I’m confused.

I can see the logic of the whole Earth-God combo. The cross-over from underground natural world to mainstream soil-worship must have been hard to fathom at first. But I can dig it.

Perhaps I should give this all a little bit more attention. It is a world religion after all.

Well, let us try to solve the conundrum of the Cow-God rap. Perhaps, like other undersexed and uneducated peoples, many rural Indian men got sick of chewing their hands off in frustration and started to find pleasure amidst the inviting warm flanks of a Friesian (or two).

And then, when, you know, others came to spread the word that perhaps cow bumming was wrong and that religion was right – these desperate and wrong-minded individuals would, cock-in-cow, laugh in the face of this preposterous modern thinking.

Until.

This religion malarkey got clever. They thought, how can we stop these ghastly men violating the honour of these poor cows? Besides we can arrange marriages now. We've got it made. It don’t matter how ugly you are.

So they took aside all those who were busy penetrating the cattle. They leaned in as if to whisper a secret and then screamed in their ear:

“Dude! Do you know that if you fuck a cow, you are effectively fucking your mother? Did you know that? So. Really. Stop it!”

And lo and behold the cow-sexing came to a premature close. (One wonders whether the entire enterprise began and ended in the pages of my own blog.)

So, it worked out well for these cows. I mean obviously they are missing out on the tactile affections of an entire millennia of inexperienced horny Indian men. The upshot is that they don’t get ritually slaughtered and are able to live out their lives roaming the streets, showing off, “Oi, move! God coming through…”