I've eaten camel in riyadh and kangaroo in perth. i just dont order meat when others at the table are vegetarian
-- srs/nokia e71 -original message- Subject: Re: [silk] Need some help From: "." <svaks...@gmail.com> Date: 21-04-2009 20:59 On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Zainab Bawa <bawazaina...@gmail.com> wrote: > Not really so. In Bangalore, a Belgian friend of mine was told that she > would be allowed to take up the place only if she promised to stay > vegetarian. Another American friend in Mumbai, married and with kids, was > refused housing on grounds of vegetarianism. Assuming that your Belgian and American friends are not Muslim, the claim that its a plot to keep out the whole Muslim community does not stand. It seems like an individual's bias about who should live in his private property. Should he be hauled to jail for that? I dont think so. He is just yet another narrow-minded person I'd would rather avoid even if the property was rent-free. Its also a misnomer that "all Hindus are vegetarian" which is more of individual choice or a family's choice in some cases, but definitely not a religious one. Religion per se is not evil, rather its the people who use (any) religion to control and grab power or dictate terms to others that are the root of the problem. What happened to your friends (and you) are an individual's bias and by stretching that line of logic I can think of gazillion personal instances when I have been discriminated against on the basis of my gender, age, nationality, skin color, religion, .... I happen to know a Sikh family who are staunch vegetarians and would not wish to mingle or marry a person different from them. I also know Jains who eat meat outside the house but toe the line and would not dare risk offending the better half (or his parents) by even mentioning "chicken tikka or kebab" at home. And yet, stretching that line of reasoning and argument is a scary double-edged sword, as in, any women could easily take offence at any matrimonial sites because they encourage Indian men to advertise for a bride thus : "Male, 31 yrs, 5'10" very fair (brown-skin is so not metro-sexual when you have skin-whitening products for men modeled by the Badshah of Bollywood himself), handsome, highly educated Phd/Engineer/Doctor/add education, add religion (category, subcaste no bar. Wow, a broad-minded bloke !) seeks a mutually compatible accomplished (read, willing to be my lifelong unpaid housemaid who will provide sex-at-my-command) educated/working (another unsaid euphemism for dowry in monthly installments) bride. The opposite is also true but they dont sound very logical to me. Would it be illogical and unfair to label every Indian male who advertises his personal preferences as a racist and chauvinistic pig or claim that "ALL men are rapists" because the proportion of men who rape is more than the opposite ; which does seem like stretching logic a wee bit too much for half the world's population being discriminated against, if numbers count. Does'nt discrimination start the moment we divide, classify and sub-classify things, people, animals, [add your poison of choice], along various criteria? Being "different" is a form of discrimination too but the last I heard, the politically correct name was "diversity". In a biological sense, each of us is uniquely different, if DNA matters. -- .
