CHINA: “The giant has awakened! Let the world tremble!”
ALSO CHINA: “We banned your tweet because it may cause our civilisation to collapse.”
I totally don’t get that country. Their messages are too mixed.
Mind you, the whole world is baffling these days. One of the defining questions of the modern era seems to be: What Is Your Position On Cow Poop?
Two news items that arrived in this columnist’s inbox on the same morning highlighted the two main options.
An angry farmer used a farm machine to spray “a wave of manure” all over a law enforcement officer’s vehicle, said a news item from Vermont in the US. There was widespread disgust at the act, commentators said. Covering your house with cow dung has huge benefits and will even make it proof against radioactive beams, a high court judge declared, according to news items from Rajasthan in India. Judge Mahesh Chand Sharma sang the praises of cow poop earlier this summer.
Clearly that US farmer should move to Asia and bring his dung-spraying machine.
What other news items highlight East-West differences?
A colleague pointed out that the US TV reality series ‘I Married A Stranger’ is now playing on screens in Asia. “But marrying a stranger is normal in much of South Asia,” she said. To have the same shock effect, she suggested starting a reality TV series called ‘I Married Someone I Knew’.
Reader Amitava Bose noted that the US beauty contestant who said “marriage is between a man and a woman” was considered by Westerners to have said something utterly outrageous while people from the East were left scratching their heads. “In the West, failure to be politically correct is a far worse crime than murder,” said Bose.
I was sceptical of this, but he pointed out that the Western media is beside itself with hysteria at President Donald Trump, who says politically incorrect things but has not murdered anyone. The exact same media worships the ground walked on by former President Barack Obama, who was politically correct but committed extra-judicial murder (he got his men to sneak into Pakistan and execute Osama Bin Laden and four others, including a woman). Good point. Bose said that if I was ever arrested for assassinating someone in a Western country (unlikely), my best defence would be to say something like: “I supported transgender rights before it was cool.”
This columnist, who has roughly equal numbers of friends who are Eastern and Westernised, liberal and conservative, tends to avoid these controversial issues.
But I was delighted to hear about a case in Mumbai that should keep all sides happy. A woman named Aarav Appukuttan felt her personality was male. A man named Sukanyeah Krishna felt his personality was female.
They went independently to a clinic for gender re-assignment — but met and fell in love, the media reported.
Now the man-turned-woman plans to marry the woman-turned-man.
Their case stomps violently on tradition, so liberals will cheer loudly, but will ultimately end up with a male marrying a female, so conservatives can also cheer loudly. Everybody’s happy, just like the bride, in her macho suit, and the groom, in his pretty dress.
(Nury Vittachi is an Asia-based frequent traveller. Send ideas and comments via his Facebook page)
