HOLY COW! gai machchi kaise kha sakti hai?????

in the throes of laughter with friends with the haze of cigarette smoke clouding my eyes.. sitting on a stone chabutara at D-school on a rather lovely cloudy afternoon.. i saw something rather startling today...
a cow munching on a fish carcass..
or so the caption beneath the picture says...


i think i laughed for about 10 minutes post which we had a rather lively discussion about why the holy being descended to that level.. in CAPITAL letters below a half page sized picture of a cow with a wierd looking brown thing in its mouth, was captioned thus

A COW feeding on a carcass of a "magur"(a black african fish) from the dried lake bed in Sultanpur bird sanctuary near Delhi. The lake is lifeline of the sanctuary's avian and aquatic residents and is also home to bluebulls and blackbucks. (sic)

a bigger red coloured tag under the picture said "DRY DAZE"

so we all had a merry debate on whether my confusion was an unwelcome comment on the freedom of choice of food for an independent-minded cow.
or if its now going to be acceptable for devoutly vegetarian Hindus to eat fish because gau- mata has been seen to be enjoying a machchi..
whether the photographer had simply gotten the wrong idea and the conscientious cow was merely carrying away the abandoned dead body of the fish to a final resting place.

the jury's still out, and my friends have threatened violence if i continue to talk about this picture. hence the blogpost.


my apologies to tiny, rave, sj, shru n bt... i can just NOT get over the sheer wierdness of that picture.

my apologies to any hapless readers patient enough to sit down n read this entire thing without being able to see the picture thats got me so confused.. you will have to wait a few days for my PC to start working coz as usual i'm using the college comps... you could ofcourse buy/borrow/steal the India Today July 5 edition and turn to page 13 to see what the fuss is all about.