Baby with two faces worshipped as Hindu diety

Amazing story from the AP in Saini Sunpura, India, via CNN.com:

A baby with two faces was born in a northern Indian village, where she is doing well and is being worshipped as the reincarnation of a Hindu goddess, her father said Tuesday.

The baby, Lali, apparently has an extremely rare condition known as craniofacial duplication, where a single head has two faces. Except for her ears, all of Lali's facial features are duplicated -- she has two noses, two pairs of lips and two pairs of eyes.

"My daughter is fine -- like any other child," said Vinod Singh, 23, a poor farm worker.

Lali has caused a sensation in the dusty village of Saini Sunpura, 25 miles east of New Delhi. When she left the hospital, eight hours after a normal delivery on March 11, she was swarmed by villagers, said Sabir Ali, the director of Saifi Hospital.

"She drinks milk from her two mouths and opens and shuts all the four eyes at one time," Ali said.

Rural India is deeply superstitious and the little girl is being hailed as a return of the Hindu goddess of valor, Durga, a fiery deity traditionally depicted with three eyes and many arms.

The Christians who live below India's caste

That didn't take long. My article for the February Christianity Today about India's treatment of "Untouchables" who convert to Christianity (or Islam) went online this morning. I mentioned it yesterday in a piece about new Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

If Dalits change their official religious identification from Hindu to Christian, they can lose benefits such as access to federal jobs or admission to government-funded universities. In December, the Supreme Court of India delayed hearings for Muslims and Christians demanding full constitutional rights.

Two months earlier, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) had issued a statement of conscience that urged the United States and Indian governments to protect Dalits from physical violence, discrimination, and economic despair.

"It is a compelling human rights issue," said Richard Cizik, vice president of governmental affairs for the NAE, "and we believe as evangelical Christians that the Dalits need to know we hear their concerns and are willing to come to their defense in a way that is diplomatic and salutary."

The church has grown significantly in India, thanks partly to an estimated 100,000 mostly native missionaries preaching throughout the country. But discrimination, both official and unofficial, continues against the Dalits.

The NAE's statement cited a 2005 killing of a Dalit man and a high-caste woman. They were beaten with rods and their throats were slit for marrying outside of their castes. The young woman's family had hired the killers.

Converting Bobby Jindal

The Times-Picayune had a lengthy profile last week of Louisiana's new Gov. Bobby Jindal that focused on the India native's conversion to Catholicism and the role that has played in his political ascent.

When Gov.-elect Bobby Jindal converted to Catholicism during high school and college, he took a momentous step away from his inherited faith of Hinduism, the prevalent religion of his parents' generation and Indian homeland.

But among Jindal's relatives and among Hindus in India generally, his decision to adopt the Christian way is strongly supported.

Jindal's personal path to Christianity, which had politically significant ramifications for Louisiana, was aided by an open-minded attitude among his relatives about theology. Also, he visited India infrequently as a child, giving him little chance to acquire the deeply ingrained appreciation for Hindu culture that comes from exposure to daily life in that country.

His relatives' perspective reflects a tolerant side of a religion that for thousands of years has survived philosophical transformations, rebellious counter-religions and numerous sects, only to claim them all in time as part of the infinitely flexible cosmos of Hindu faith.

"If you find and see that you get more peace of mind, more solace, in that religion, then why not change religion?" said Jindal's uncle Subhash Gupta, a practicing Hindu. "In India, many people change to the Christian religion. And I can understand that some people maybe find Christian religion more satisfying to their needs."

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Although the relatives' opinions might seem magnanimous, their views are typically Hindu. India's large-circulation national newspapers viewed Jindal's election as front-page news, and for the most part his conversion to Catholicism was not commented upon negatively. Indian criticism of Jindal instead has centered on his infrequent visits and seeming lack of interest in his parents' home country.

The Indian national figure Mahatma Gandhi, a Hindu so famous his image appears on most Indian currency, espoused religious tolerance because he believed there were many paths to God, so long as an individual was sincere in the pursuit of the divine way.

When asked about Jindal, Pandit Deoki Nandan Shastri, a Hindu holy man in Varanasi, made a similar point.

"Hindu is not a religion," he said. "Hinduism is a way of life."

"You pray to Christ, I pray to Rama, he prays to Mohammad," he said. "We are going the same way. God is one. His name is called a thousand names."

Sadly, such a liberal perspective is not universal in India, where Hindu fundamentalists poignantly remind the world that "religious extremist" is not just a code word for Islamic terrorist. Remember the Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom five years ago that left 2,000 people dead, including a woman who's fetus was proudly ripped from her womb by this guy.


The fervency of Hindu nationalism is no secret; it gave birth to Pakistan and later Bangladesh. And India has had quite the history of violence against Christians, which sprang up again on Christmas Eve.

On Christmas Eve, violence broke out against Christians in the Kandhamal district of the eastern Indian state of Orissa, which has become well known for poor governance and class tensions. Hindu fundamentalist groups led by the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP, the World Hindu Council) have attacked Christians and their institutions at will in rural areas. Over 90 churches and Christian institutions have been burned and vandalized, over 700 Christian homes destroyed, and the number of pastors and Christians killed is yet to be known, according to a report by my colleagues in the All India Christian Council. A pastor in Chennai told me that 11 pastors have been killed and thousands of Dalit (formerly known as untouchable) Christians displaced. Compass Direct reports that the death count is at 9. Many people are missing, and others have vanished in the nearby forests.

Human Rights Watch and others have decried the present carnage in Orissa and have recognized that freedom of religious choice — especially in a democracy like India's — must be respected. The Prime Minister promised immediate action to restore peace in the state. But the affected areas are still reporting sporadic violence over two weeks since the attacks against Dalit Christians began.

Despite reports that Christians retaliated in some places, so far Dalit Freedom Network investigations and statements by the Orissa government indicate that Maoist rebels — called Naxalites — were behind the revenge attacks that left dozens of Hindu families homeless. Most Naxalites are armed Dalits, and their involvement gives evidence of the root problem: ancient caste divisions.

The author of this piece was Joseph D'Souza, whom I interviewed a few months ago for an article about the plight of the Dalits -- who dwell beneath the bottom of India's cast system -- that will appear in the February Christianity Today.

One of the biggest forms of discrimination meted out by the government is that Dalits who convert to Christianity or Islam lose their welfare eligibility. The same is not true if they converted to Buddhism or Sikhism. This often causes a dual identity.

"They will have their Hindu or pre-Christian indentity, sometimes keeping their Hindu name, because there is affirmative action and if they want to have the benefits of that, they cannot use their Christian name," Robert Eric Frykenberg, professor emeritus of history and South Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin, told me.

For more info about discrimination in India, I'll link to the article when it runs.

Kenyan mob burns down church and those inside

NAIROBI, Kenya — Dozens of people seeking refuge in a church in Kenya were burned to death by a mob on Tuesday in an explosion of ethnic violence that is threatening to engulf this country, which until last week was one of the most stable in Africa.

According to witnesses and Red Cross officials, up to 50 people died inside the church in a small village in western Kenya after a furious crowd doused it with gasoline and set it on fire.

In Nairobi, the capital, tribal militias squared off against each other in several slums, with gunshots ringing out and clouds of black smoke wafting over the shanties. The death toll across the country is steadily rising.

Witnesses indicate that more than 250 people have been killed in the past two days in bloodshed connected to a disputed election Kenya held last week.

Read the rest of the story here.

The victims appear to have been targeted because they of their ethnicity, unlike last week's attacks in India, when Hindu nationalists went nuts on Christians, burning down dozens of churches and killing an unconfirmed few.

Muslim massacre in Hindu India

This massive report in Tehelka on a 2002 massacre of Muslims in India will really make your stomach turn. Rampaging Hindu zealots -- yes, they come in all religious flavors -- left more than 2,000 people dead, some in the most gruesome ways possible.

Dozens of eyewitnesses who deposed before the Nanavati-Shah Commission recounted scenes of children being burnt alive and women being raped. “We didn’t spare any of them,” Bajrangi said. “They shouldn’t be allowed to breed. Whoever they are, even if they’re women or children, there’s nothing to be done with them; cut them down. Thrash them, slash them, burn the bastards.”

Kauser Bano, was nine months pregnant that day. Her belly was torn open and her foetus wrenched out, held aloft on the tip of a sword, then dashed to the ground and flung into a fire. Bajrangi recounts how he ripped apart “ek woh pregnant… b*******d sala”; how he showed Muslims the meaning of wrath—“If you harm us, we can respond — we’re no khichdi-kadhi lot”.

The MotherJones blog says it's long been known that the Indian government was complicit -- these kinds of sectarian slayings have been ongoing since the Indian partition -- "this time, it was all caught on tape."

Looking at the model of 'Jewish power'

Jews generally take offense to the phrase "Jewish power" because of its historically anti-Semitic overtones (Goldberg says that in the beginning of his book). But some ethnic groups appreciate the model of Jewish success, and today the NY Times tells the tale through the experiences of Indian-Americans.

Indian-Americans, who now number 2.4 million in this country, are turning to American Jews as role models and partners in areas like establishing community centers, advocating on civil rights issues and lobbying Congress.

Indians often say they see a version of themselves and what they hope to be in the experience of Jews in American politics: a small minority that has succeeded in combating prejudice and building political clout.

“It echoes 30 years ago,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the [Simon] Wiesenthal [C]enter. “There is the same feeling of a growing community that says, ‘We want our voices to be represented, and how do we that?’"

The intersection of God and grades

In the latest addition of UCLA Magazine, which went online today and should be in the mail for alumni, I have a cover story about the intersection of spirituality and scholarship.

I've written here that religion gets passing grades on college campuses, even secular ones like my alma mater. In this article, I focused on four students -- a Christian, a Jew, a Hindu and a Muslim -- and told their stories through the findings of the largest national study of college student spirituality.

Brandon Kuiper arrived at UCLA with a strong Christian faith and an inquisitive scientific mind. He didn't believe in evolution, but he was intent on studying neuroscience. Something was bound to give, but the biggest spiritual crisis in Kuiper's 20 years came not from South Campus but from studying the philosophy of Voltaire and Hobbes and Kant and Freud.

"I was reading that stuff and I thought, ‘This makes so much sense.' I had to stop and evaluate why I am a Christian and what I believe," he recalls. "I remember thinking, ‘What if I've been wrong all along?' "

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There's certainly no shortage of seekers. A study by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) found that three-fourths of freshmen are "searching for meaning/purpose in life" and that half are either "seeking" or "doubting" their spiritual understanding of the world. Forty percent said it was very important they follow a set of religious teachings.

"It is the nature of the beast of people that age. It's just part of being a college student," says Alexander Astin, co-leader of the "Spirituality in Higher Education" study and an emeritus professor of higher education. "College students are on a developmental adventure."

My favorite vignette was that of Marco Gonzalez, a Mexico Jew who arrived at UCLA with little understanding of his heritage. That led him to the Chabad House (I guess all their outreach on campus does attract some students).

On a Wednesday night, Gonzalez enters the upstairs classroom at Chabad and pulls out his textbook, Jewish Essentials: A Spiritual Guide to Jewish Life & Living.

"In the last couple of classes, we learned about the paramount importance of the Torah," Rabbi Dovid Gurevich, the Chabad campus co-director, says. "The Torah was received at Mt. Sinai, and the next holiday we celebrate, Shavuot, reminds us of that. That is very nice, but we have to make it practical and real ... We have to learn ways to make it real in our daily lives."

Tonight Gonzalez and three other students learn about the mezuzah (a sacred parchment hung on door posts to make holy the room inside) and tefillin (the boxes containing passages of the Torah and the leather straps Orthodox Jews use for prayer).

On college-ruled paper, Gonzalez takes detailed notes. "I want to be able to pass on these traditions to my children," he says. "I want to know what I'm talking about, so that when they have questions I don't have to say, ‘Ask a rabbi.' "

Gonzalez departs about 9:30 and heads straight to Powell to finish studying for a midterm the next day on international relations of the Middle East. But he doesn't mind staying up late and getting up early if it means not missing the time at Chabad.

"I would rather go to Chabad and learn it and enjoy it there, and just put in some extra time into my classes," Gonzalez says. "I've been taking the class at Chabad, and it's almost like having another class for school. But it's a more important subject. It is the subject of our lives."

The art for this story is amazing, and, to be honest, does a good job embarrassing my reporting. Let's hope the Bruins football team doesn't add insult tomorrow.

'How a Muslim billionaire thrives in Hindu India'

BANGALORE, India -- The world's richest Muslim entrepreneur defies conventional wisdom about Islamic tycoons: He doesn't hail from the Persian Gulf, he didn't make his money in petroleum, and he definitely doesn't wear his faith on his sleeve.

A native of Mumbai, Azim Premji has tapped India's abundant engineering talent to transform a family vegetable-oil firm, Wipro Ltd., into a technology and outsourcing giant. By serving Western manufacturers, airlines and utilities, the company has brought Mr. Premji a fortune of some $17 billion -- believed to be greater than that of any other Muslim outside of Persian Gulf royalty.

Such success, Mr. Premji says in an interview, shows that globalization -- a force Islamist activists decry as Western neocolonialism -- is turning into "two-way traffic" that can bring tangible benefits to developing countries.

Mr. Premji's rise is already inspiring some Indian Muslims to embrace the modern, globalized world. "He's an icon. He shows that excellence has no caste and no creed, and that if one has excellence, one can make it to the top," says Mohamed Javeed, principal of Bangalore's predominantly Muslim Al-Ameen College. One of the students, Mohammed Nasseer, enthuses, "I'd love to become like Premji one day."

A role model like Mr. Premji might seem to be what India's Muslims need. Though the country's economy is growing at 9% a year, the vast majority of India's estimated 150 million Muslims -- the largest Islamic population in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan -- remain socially marginalized, badly educated and mired in deep poverty. By and large, they're left out of the social transformation that is propelling millions of their Hindu compatriots into prosperity, as barriers of caste disappear and India's new corporate giants provide opportunities that never existed before.

This is from yesterday's Wall Street Journal. I was grabbed by the headline, "How a Muslim billionaire thrives in Hindu India." To be honest, I didn't realize there were any professionally successful Muslims in India. To begin with, Pakistan was created in 1947 because the Britons were tired of their colonial ways and the Hindus and Muslims couldn't live together. (This was a process Britain tried repeating in Palestine.) The partition was incredibly bloody, and must Muslims who could cross into Pakistan did so.

That one of the many Muslims who remained could amass such wealth was surprising, certainly encouraging. Not surprising, though, was the response of Indian Islam's devout.

"If you are a Muslim and want to be rich in India, you have to show you are very secular," says Zafarul Islam Khan, secretary-general of the All-India Muslim Majlis e Mushawarat, an umbrella group.

A Muslim school a half-hour's drive from Mr. Premji's Bangalore home reveals the chasm between this globalist success story and the country's Muslim masses. Students sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Masjid e Takwa madrassa spend their days memorizing the Quran in Arabic -- a language that neither they nor their teacher understand.

The classes are taught in Urdu, a tongue that's largely confined to Muslims and uses the Arabic script. There is no science in the curriculum. Neither is there English, the language in which Wipro conducts business and interviews job applicants, as it looks for Westernized staff who can deal with international customers.

The madrassa's imam, Munir Ahmed, says that for his students, a future as self-employed shopkeepers or peddlers is preferable to seeking formal work at a large company. "A job is like being a slave," Mr. Ahmed chuckles, adding that his graduates are in great demand as teachers in other madrassas. Schoolboys in the streets nearby, asked about Wipro, say they've never heard of it or of Mr. Premji.

This is obviously an issue that resonates with religious minorities wherever they live. Here in the States, there is a constant tension -- some times healthy, some times less so -- between Muslims remaining fastened to tradition and the acculturation necessary for upward mobility. German- and Yiddish-speaking Jews went through this a century or more ago, and, depending on who you talk to, they're still suffering the ills of assimilation.

So the question is this: Is it wrong for someone to miscegenate the traditions of their religion with those of their host community? Are all those Muslims and Hindus and Jainists and Jews who have adjusted observance to prosper in this country making too big a sacrifice?

Goat sacrifice and frequent flyer miles

Whenever I am in need of a post topic, I visit my friend the Bible Belt Blogger and he fills me up, today with a BBC story about how an Indian airline was chopping off goat heads to appease the gods. The BBB says:

This may be the first time that goats have died to prevent Boeing 757s from experiencing mechanical difficulties. However, I've read that chickens are sometimes fired, at high speeds -- into the sides of jumbo jets to be sure they're structurally sound.

(For added enjoyment, download this song.)

Does ritual meditation belong in schools?

An editor once told me to avoid quoting officials from Americans United for Separation of Church and State because, he said, they lack any constituency and its executive director, the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, often looks like a caricature of a religious libertarian.

But this morning, as I listened to a report on NPR's Day to Day about more public schools teaching children transcendental meditation, and as I began to ponder how I would blog about the religious implications of such a school program, a lawyer involved with AU was quoted on the segment saying much of what I had been thinking:

"It's not the business of the public schools to lead kids to inner-peace through a spiritual process. ... If you teach transcendental mediation, you open the floodgates and allow any spiritual or religious group to have access to formal teaching of its edicts in public schools."

The goal of the program is to "reduce stress, increase focus and bolster achievement," and the principal of the inner-city school featured on the report said that attacks on TM as religious ritual are overblown. "I'm a Baptist. ... I have one God."

Still, I have serious reservations about a movement reportedly spreading to 100 schools nationwide by next year. School prayer cannot be institutionally driven when it is Christian or Muslim or Jewish in theme. So why would religious prayer be OK when it has roots in an eastern religion?

Tangentially: A great episode from the third season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" -- they're all great -- is "The Special Section," in which Larry David gives Richard Lewis his meditating mantra, "Jai-ya." The phrase, which Larry had said thousands of times before, is not actually something that brings peace, but causes more of the chaos common to Larry David's life. It means "F--- me."

Hindu prayer in Senate an 'abomination'

Really? This is what some Christians consider effective evangelism?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Three protesters disrupted a prayer by a Hindu chaplain Thursday at the opening of a Senate hearing, calling it an abomination and shouting slogans about Jesus Christ.

It was the first time the daily prayer that opens Senate proceedings was said by a Hindu chaplain.

Capitol police said two women and one man were arrested and charged with causing a disruption in the public gallery of the Senate. The three started shouting when guest Chaplain Rajan Zed, a Hindu from Nevada, began his prayer.

They shouted "No Lord but Jesus Christ" and "There's only one true God," and used the term "abomination."

Does anybody else notice parallels of language to that used by Islamic terrorists?

Religions: Different paths to the same point?

They are not, according to an article in the current Newsweek by religious scholar Stephen Prothero that asks whether the major religions are all alike. But "since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across the United States in the 1960s, it has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful—and all are true."

According to this multicultural form of wisdom, the world's religions are merely different paths up the same mountain. But are they? Religious people do agree that there is something wrong with this world. But they disagree as soon as they start to diagnose the problem, and diverge even more when it comes to prescriptions for the cure. Christians see sin as the human problem and salvation from sin as the religious goal. Buddhists see suffering (which, in this tradition, is not ennobling) as the problem and liberation from suffering (nirvana) as the goal. If practitioners of the world's religions are all climbing a mountain, then they are ascending very different peaks and using very different tools.

You would think that multiculturalists would warm to this fact. But instead they try to flatten out diversity by pretending that the differences between, say, Judaism and Taoism are more apparent than real. How fulsome is religious diversity if all the religions are essentially the same, and a little interfaith dialogue can talk it all away?

Global warming threatens sacred Hindu river

What did God mean when he established his covenant with Noah? "Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth." Clearly he didn't mean massive flooding had lost its power to kill the masses, but He says a few verses later that "never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life."

OK. Well, scientists and policy wonks are increasingly saying that climate change -- which is not God's doing but our own -- is setting the stage for some cataclysmic future flooding.

Last week, I mentioned how Jewish leaders are beginning to frame global warming as a looming catastrophe for Israel. Then The Washington Post had this report on global warming's indirect threat to millions upon millions more people.

VARANASI, India -- With her eyes sealed, Ramedi cupped the murky water of the Ganges River in her hands, lifted them toward the sun, and prayed for her husband, her 15 grandchildren and her bad hip. She, like the rest of India's 800 million Hindus, has absolute faith that the river she calls Ganga Ma can heal.

Around Ramedi, who like some Indians has only one name, people converged on the riverbank in the early morning, before the day's heat set in. Women floated necklaces of marigolds on a boat of leaves, a dozen skinny boys soaped their hair as they bathed in their underwear, and a somber group of men carried a body to the banks of the river, a common ritual before the dead are cremated on wooden funeral pyres. To be cremated beside the Ganges, most here believe, brings salvation from the cycle of rebirth.

"Ganga Ma is everything to Hindus. It's our chance to attain nirvana," Ramedi said, emerging from the river, her peach-colored sari dripping along the shoreline.

But the prayer rituals carried out at the water's edge may not last forever -- or even another generation, according to scientists and meteorologists. The Himalayan source of Hinduism's holiest river, they say, is drying up.

In this 3,000-year-old city known as the Jerusalem of India for its intense religious devotion, climate change could throw into turmoil something many devout Hindus thought was immutable: their most intimate religious traditions. The Gangotri glacier, which provides up to 70 percent of the water of the Ganges during the dry summer months, is shrinking at a rate of 40 yards a year, nearly twice as fast as two decades ago, scientists say.

"This may be the first place on Earth where global warming could hurt our very religion. We are becoming an endangered species of Hindus," said Veer Bhadra Mishra, an engineer and director of the Varanasi-based Sankat Mochan Foundation, an organization that advocates for the preservation of the Ganges. "The melting glaciers are a terrible thing. We have to ask ourselves, who are the custodians of our culture if we can't even help our beloved Ganga?"

Did religious differences lead to ghastly murders?

Throughout history, the answer to that question has often been yes. But it's not yet clear whether a bad breakup based on religious differences led to the gruesome murders of an OC Hindu family. It's just what police are suggesting. From the LA Times:

She was a college freshman whose Hindu family didn't believe in dating before marriage. He was a Muslim, which troubled her parents, and they convinced her that he wasn't the one.

Their breakup, investigators said, might have played a role in a string of vicious crimes that unfolded in Orange County last week: Her Anaheim Hills home was set ablaze, her mother savagely beaten and her father and sister killed. The victims had been strangled, bludgeoned, burned and stabbed, according to court records.

The young man, Iftekhar Murtaza, 22, of Van Nuys, was arrested last weekend at the Phoenix airport in connection with the slayings. He had left Southern California after investigators questioned him and was carrying a one-way ticket to Bangladesh.

Murtaza today waived his right to an extradition hearing in Arizona and will be returned to OC and charged with murder.

Hindus and Muslims have a recent history of hatred. Before the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan, fighting between the two religious groups claimed about half a million lives.

Gere's sexual offense

Have you heard that story about Richard Gere? No, not the gerbil hoax that tainted Dr. T when I was a kid. But the one about Gere smooching Bollywood babe Shilpa Shetty at an AIDS awareness event in New Delhi last month.

As my friend Manya Brachear points out on her blog for the Chicago Tribune, Gere's actions "enraged some Hindus who thought the public display violated laws of public obscenity."

If apprehended, Gere can be sent to jail for up to three months, fined or both. He is not in India now but can be held if he visits the country again, which he does for at least three weeks each year to study Tibetan Buddhism under the tutelage of the Dalai Lama, who lives in exile in northern India. He is also involved with AIDS prevention groups there.

Daniel Gold, a professor of South Asian religions at Cornell University, said exceptions are traditionally made for Bollywood stars and Westerners who do not abide by Hindu laws."In general public displays of affection are not part of Indian traditional culture and most people are rather restrained about that," Gold said. "The world of Bollywood stars is a whole other world. They have inter-caste marriages, inter-religious marriages. People accept it. But it’s nothing that they would do."

But Vasudha Narayanan, a professor of religion at the University of Florida, said it wasn’t until recently that kissing was considered acceptable by censors, no matter how sexually suggestive an actor’s gestures might be.

"As a general rule of the thumb it would be expected that any visitor to the country should follow the norms and customs of that place and not do anything that would be knee-jerk offensive," she said.

"Many people are against these types of lawsuits saying it depicts India in a very negative light and India is in many ways an extraordinarily progressive country," she added. "But like any other place particularly so in India, it’s a land of extremes."

According to Britian's gossip magazine Now, Shetty thinks the whole scandal is ridiculous:

"Can you believe it? It's so, so stupid," Shilpa, 31, exclaims. "The lunatic fringe went ballistic over nothing.

"Richard was bending me backwards and he kissed me on the cheek. But the news stations were rewinding and replaying the same shot over and over again on primetime TV. They didn't talk about the HIV problem that faces this country.

"I was furious when I saw people burning effigies of Richard. That sort of behaviour is not representative of my country."