The queer customs of the hindoo

Ah, mysterious India, ever in flux yet steadfastly the same! While greenbacks, terabytes and bushy-tailed MBAs woosh back and forth between Bangalore and Wall Street, the eructations of Tom Friedman speeding them across the Flat World like some kind of ill pneumatics, the doings of the superstitious masses still supply orientalists correspondents with fare for cutesiness and condescension. As Henry Chu sat barricaded at the crib contemplating his Siddhartha is balls, Jonathan Allen of the New York Times was bravely setting off into Delhi’s diesel dawn to document the queer customs of the Hindoo.

Siddhartha is amused/aghast/irritated by a NYT piece on a Disneylandish temple in Delhi, and a L.A.Times piece on Hijras in Bombay.