According to more US diplomatic cables, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Kumari Mayawati is a 'paranoid … egomaniac' obsessed with becoming prime minister, and with a very particular brand of sandals. Evidently, she once sent her private jet – empty – to fetch her favourite brand from Mumbai. Seizing the moment, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi condemned Mayawati as corrupt and dishonest. Duly incensed, the chief minister went on the attack: not against the cables or the US diplomats who wrote them, but against the founder of the Wikileaks whistleblower organisation Julian Assange, as well as Naqvi – both of whom, she alleged, must have been on the same 'special plane'.
From there sprung a round-robin of amusing quips and cheeky back-and-forth. The 'owner of WikiLeaks' needs to be in a mental asylum, Mayawati said, offering to take the Australian to an Agra institution. Asylum sounds great, but a political one, responded Assange, who is fighting extradition from the UK to Sweden where he faces rape charges. If Mayawati were to grant him asylum, Assange even promised to send her the finest British footwear! Thus far, Mayawati has remained quiet on this offer – undoubtedly a smart move, given the trajectory of this particular bout of wordsmithing.
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Is Bhutan really turning against its phalluses? Apparently, modern Bhutanese, especially those in Thimphu, do not want three-foot-high penises painted on their doors, nor equally high wooden ones installed in their compounds to ward off evil – a ritual still in practice in villages all over Bhutan. According to folklore, a saint called Drukpa Kunley, the 'Divine Madman', used to use his sex organ to seduce women, a fairly prosaic use compared to what else he could do with his member: spew fire (!), fly (!!) and burn demonesses to death (!!!). Little wonder, then, that symbolic penii have proliferated for centuries as good-luck charms. Because the Bhutanese government considers preserving culture instrumental in achieving the goals of Gross National Happiness, authorities are worried about a growing trend in Thimphu that shuns these symbols. A researcher at the Centre for Bhutan Studies laments the influence of Western culture and warns that people only realise what they have lost once it has been lost. He also noted, somehow, that phallic symbology reminds people of the 'unnecessary domination of affairs by men' and the 'commonplace existence of sexual activity'. Anyway, if you want to see the divine staffs before they disappear, don't wait too long. In ten years time, some suggest, they will be gone.