Pranjal wrote:

forking indians

what a dumb thing to say!

vaishy wrote:

I just saw an AP news clip about an Indian court ending a barbaric practice in the state of Tamil Nadu: each year, on Jan. 16, people across the state would "celebrate" the harvest season by forcing liquor down the throat of bulls and throwing chili powder into their eyes, after which revelers would chase them and stone them. The New York Times wrote about this in their travel section last year:  http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/tr … etter.html The article said the practice is older even than the running of the bulls in Spain- 2,000 years old, in fact.
Part of me is really, really thankful about the court's ban, and part of me is really, really sickened to realize this has been going on for centuries.
Any thoughts?

There were all kinds of bull shenanigans in Spain 2000 years ago, too. Bull-centered worship was (and is) really common. In Crete they used to leap over bulls and do all kinds of acrobatics, and if you think back to your Greek mythology there are lots of stories about bulls (the minotaur, Hercules and the bull, Zeus turning into a bull). Present day things like the running of the bulls evolved from older traditions. Bull-leaping and -baiting still occurs in lots of places besides Spain and India including France, the US (think rodeo), and Latin America, and there's similar bull-on-bull fights in places like Switzerland and Japan.

Sorry, that's probably more than you care to know, but I'm excited that I actually learned something in college.