Odd Stories Out of India

Straight Outta Ranchi

Employer beheads worker for not milking cows

RANCHI, India - An employer in eastern India beheaded one of his workers for failing to milk his cows, police said on Saturday. Neighbors watched in horror as Upendra Yadav was dragged out of his house in Jharkhand state on Friday by his angry employer. The employer’s father and brother held Yadav down before he was beheaded with a sword, police said. The employer has been charged with murder.

Never lose your head over unspilt milk.

Straight Outta Patna

Brother, can you spare a bride?

PATNA, India - Villagers at a wedding in eastern India decided the groom had arrived too drunk to get married, and so the bride married the groom’s more sober brother instead, police said Monday. “The groom was drunk and had reportedly misbehaved with guests when the bride’s family and local villagers chased him away,” Madho Singh, a senior police officer told Reuters after Sunday’s marriage in a village in Bihar state’s Arwal district. The younger brother readily agreed to take the groom’s place beside the teenage bride at her family’s invitation, witnesses said. “The groom apologized for his behavior, but has been crying that word will spread and he will never get a bride again,” Singh said by phone.

I have never seen a more quintessential example of brotherly love than for a man to save his brother from marriage. Now that’s taking one for the family!

Straight Outta Jaipur

Gere says “end the circus” over India public kiss

Asking the media “to end the circus,” Hollywood star Richard Gere said Friday that his kissing of Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty was due to his failure to understand local culture. An Indian court (in Jaipur), acting on a complaint by a local lawyer, described the kiss as an obscene act in public and ordered Gere’s arrest. The kiss sparked sporadic protests in India.

Gere twirled Shetty in his arms, arched her over and kissed her several times on the cheek at an event in New Delhi last week to promote AIDS awareness among Indian truckers. Gere has since left India. “My clumsy attempt at a ‘Shall We Dance’ dance move was a naive misread of Indian customs,” Gere said in statement addressed to “my dear Indian friends” and issued by an AIDS charity he is associated with.

The 57-year-old “Pretty Woman” star’s posters and straw effigies were burned in protest in some parts of India, mostly by Hindu vigilante groups, who saw it as an outrage against Shetty’s modesty and an affront to Indian culture. Shetty, the winner of the “Celebrity Big Brother” reality TV show in Britain this year, had said the kiss may have gone a “little overboard” but it was not obscene and the protests made India look regressive.

what a Shetty thing to do

Although Gere, who also starred in “An Officer and a Gentleman,” could face three months in jail or a fine or both for such an offence, he told a U.S. cable channel Thursday that he did not know anyone who had gone to jail for something like this. Gere, a devout Buddhist, visits India frequently to meet the Dalai Lama, who lives in exile in northern India, and is a vocal supporter of the Tibetan cause as well as being involved with charities dealing with AIDS and orphans in the country.

I gotta go with the protesters on this one. I’m pretty sure that Gere performing public displays of affection should be regarded as an obscene act, in any culture.

Straight Outta Kolkata

India woman imprisoned by in-laws for 15 years

KOLKATA, India (Reuters) - Police in India have rescued a 40-year-old woman who was imprisoned by her in-laws in a dingy room for 15 years because she could not pay enough dowry. Police said the woman, Madhavi Das, was naked and locked in the room when policemen broke in with help from neighbors on Saturday. “She was admitted in a mental asylum as years of solitary confinement has taken a toll on her sanity,” Siddhi Nath Gupta, a senior police officer, said on Sunday. Three members of the family, including her husband, were arrested.

The most common reported form of domestic violence in India is dowry-related, where women are abused and beaten and even killed by their in-laws for not bestowing enough gifts or money to their husbands or their families at the time of marriage.

Moral: don’t be a cheap-ass, or we’ll turn you into OldGirl

~BG