Lama Drukpa Kuenley, who came to Bhutan from Tibet, was a great Buddhist saint who used the phallus as a 'medium' to subdue and discipline the malevolent spirits.

The young do not feel intruded when the old tag along with packed lunches. The old have no qualms about sharing high school jokes with their grandchildren as the pines and the cypresses shade their walk to the picnic.

They carry packed lunches in wooden tiffins and tea in Chinese-made flasks with pictures of scary dragons. Picnics are for everyone, as the destination is a monastery.

National dress is mandatory in Bhutan to enter religious sites. So, men can be seen in a Scottish-styled knee-length robe (gho) and women wearing a highly colorful and intricately designed ankle-length dress (kira).

If the climb to the monastery is too inaccessible, then the gho and the kira are stuffed into a backpack along with the lunch.

The picnickers wear jeans, jackets and sneakers and listen to Curt Cobain or Britney Spears from their ear plugs. Some mobile phones scream out loud FM stations playing local Dzongkha songs.

Chimi Lhakhang will not seem far away as you climb up to the monastery enjoying the blend of music, nature and the gurgle of River Punatsangchhu.

Tourists who come to this 14th Century monastery, drive up the hill and have to stop by the rice fields. Then it’s a leisurely walk until the complex wood work on the roof become clearer.

But the first time I went there, I took a different route from the northern side. It was a walk up from Punakha, the former capital of Bhutan, till the culvert on the road from were you could see the monastery of the Divine Madman who subdued demons and women with his enormous phallus.

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Then we descend to the banks of the river, walk alongside it till we reach the foot of the monastery hill.

The climb uphill was always punctuated by the stories about the maverick saint, whose blessings the local females and tourists seek to become pregnant. The walk would become smoother with the stories and chants about him.

Here is a smooth prayer, which the saint had apparently taught:

The mind of a Bodhisattva is smooth,
The talk of self-seekers is smoother,
But the thighs of a virgin are smoother than silk:
That is the teaching on the Three Smooth Things.
Women in the group would giggle as the men would further be inspired and continue churning out more outrageous ones.

The divine thunderbolt

Lama Drukpa Kuenley, who came to Bhutan from Tibet, was a great Buddhist saint who used the phallus as a ‘medium’ to subdue and discipline the malevolent spirits. The use of phallus was also intended to free up the social inhibitions enforced by the established values.

The blessing of the phallus kept in the monastery is considered sacred especially to barren women. And once they give birth, the child, male or female, is named after the saint, Kuenley.

The phallus of the saint is drawn on walls of houses across the country and one cannot miss it or avoid it.

Elsewhere it would seem scandalous, but that’s what makes Bhutan different and makes even a picnic spiritually satisfying.

I no longer stay near the temple. Almost 70 kilometers away, I stay in the capital of Bhutan now. But I have been there, a couple of times after on taxis and motorbikes.

In the last week of August, I had the opportunity to talk about the temple to a small group of students pursuing a Masters degree in cultural psychology.

We had a lively discussion for about two hours, but I didn’t recite this centuries old Drukpa Kuenley son:

The bed is the workshop of sex,
And should be wide and comfortable;
The knee is the messenger of sex,
And should be sent up in advance

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Are you an exotic writer? Non-American ‘isms’ that can grab eyeballs from your remote locations include Communism(Marxism), Buddhism, Talibanism etc…

If you are writing from queer corners of the third world pepper your posts with names that resemble The Dalai Lama or of any beard-donning-gun-totting Khan or Mohammed.

Even if you do not have any porn-related subject to write you can co(i)n new third-world themes as poverty porn, ethnic porn, religious porn etc…

Season your writing with outbursts like fuck and asshole: I assure, you won’t have to quit all fucked-up. (btw I am using the words for the first and the last time on T/S. But I have unsuccessfully attempted sex-related posts)

When you start writing for a site, confirm whether you would be paid or not. If you are complacent, you will end up not writing enough like me (and becoming lazy and not focusing on increasing  number of views or comments) or will remain unpaid till you are graciously kicked out.

The 1 H that follows the 5 Ws is hits not how.

You can follow me at:

Read my old T/S posts and upcoming pieces at http://grossblogalhappiness.wordpress.com/

I twitter regularly http://twitter.com/abytharakan

I am on facebook http://www.facebook.com/abytharakan

I am a consultant with http://www.businessbhutan.bt/:  the only financial newspaper from Himalayan Bhutan, the world’s youngest democracy.

Very soon I will start writing for http://futurechallenges.org/web/guest/about

Acknowledgments: For all wonderful friends in Bhutan and elsewhere who read my T/S page, for Coates who gave me a space here.

You see, it’s just this climate change thing. Because to get the voice of a third world country to be heard in the international media, there should be frequent bomb blasts, bad English or melting glaciers.

And thanks to Uncle Gore, his climate change documentary has helped a lot of people understand climate change in my part of the world.

Since we learnt global warming through him, we have also started asking why Gore couldn’t bore (sorry bear) the marriage with Tipper.

Thus, the interest in him.

But unfortunately, I have not been able to access the National Enquirer story about the massage therapist who accused him of sexually assaulting her in 2006 in a Portland hotel room.

When I searched the story, Internet Explorer said I cannot access this story in my country.

And then I bumped across this Salon article which said the Portland Tribune got a tip  about the incident and followed the story for a year, but couldn’t publish it because the story didn’t couldn’t keep up with the paper’s “standards of journalistic responsibility.”

Using a combination of sources and shoe leather, the Tribune spent a year tracking down the alleged victim, reaching out to associates of hers and of Gore, and learning about their habits and their accounts of the evening in question. The paper went so far as to take out ads on Craigslist searching for more potential victims in other cities that Gore had visited. But in the end, the Tribune could not put together a story that met its standards of journalistic responsibility.

“The truth is we very much wanted to report the story on Al Gore,” said Mark Garber, 54, executive editor of the Tribune, a 60,000-circulation free weekly that also publishes news every day online. “We worked on it for a year so that we could report the story. There’s nothing we would have liked more.” Salon reported.

Image via Wikipedia

But this country, which had its first national elections for a democratic parliament in 2008 after 100 years of royal rule is important geopolitically.

Wedged between the worlds biggest markets, India and China, this country of deep ravines and dense forests, prides of a development philosophy called Gross National Happiness.

Economists like Joseph Stiglitz are deeply engaging with the idea as a workable alternative for the Wall Street driven capitalistic model.

Though rich in natural resources, Bhutan has pledged in it’s Constitution signed with golden ink  by the  30-year-old Oxford-educated monarch, that 60% of the country will be forests for all times to come.

Bhutan is also a global warming touchstone, thanks to the fast melting glaciers that feed its economic power houses, hydro power power projects.

Due to its isolated nature, the international media has been portraying  Bhutan as a shy Shangri-La and the last bastion of Tantric Buddhism after the fall of Tibet. Much of the coverage has been too romanticized and sometimes is even  filled with lies, like the award-winning Washington Post correspondent who wrote that yaks wait for a signal from the traffic policeman in capital Thimphu.

Foreign correspondents fly in for a day or two, churn out a feel-good story, and leave. My urge to write for an international audience was encouraged by the way this region, including my country, India, has been represented in the international media.

Edward Said has written about how Muslims of the Middle East were often depicted as filthy-rich oil sheikhs or terrorists. But no one has substantially studied about how Buddhists are being depicted as one-dimensional saints who smile 24/7 and cannot come to grips with modern ways of life (read democracy, banking, English language etc).

True/Slant has provided me an opportunity to present this region as honestly as possible without bordering on the exotica, but at the same time write stuff that interests this site’s audience. I am not a paid writer here, so I am not worried about what happens to me when True/Slant enters the Forbes fold. This Daily Finance piece  by T/S Contributor Jeff Bercovici sounded interesting, reflecting the fear of many other writers here.

True/Slant, the blogging platform for journalists and other experts, is in for a major overhaul underits new owner, Forbes Media. Lewis Dvorkin, founder of the former and newly appointed chief product officer of the latter, previewed some of the changes in store during a Wednesday morning conference call with True/Slant contributors. (There are 300 or so, including me.)

Dvorkin was careful to say that it’s still early days and there remains much to be determined, but the overall thrust is pretty much what you would expect: A lot of the True/Slant content that doesn’t fall intoForbes’ areas of focus — business, investing, economics, government, health care, etc. — will likely disappear, and the writers who produce it will either need to find new topics to write about or new outlets to write for. “Forbesis different than True/Slant,” Dvorkin said. “There are a lot of things they don’t do. They don’t cover ice skating [for example].”

“More Directed, More Focused, More Angled”

All T/S bloggers will be kept on and paid through June, but during that time, Dvorkin andForbeswill determine which ones to keep and which to drop. Niche blogs in areas outsideForbes’ ken — such as, say,a fan blog about a single football team in the NFL’s smallest media market– are likely to go, but so are those blogs whose focus is too nonspecific. “Moving forward, the generalists’ role … would not be the best way to go,” Dvorkin said. “A lot of the pages will be more directed, more focused, more angled.

In a humane touch, those writers who aren’t invited to stay on will have the option of migrating their archives onto a new WordPress blog with technical assistance from True/Slant. See full article from DailyFinance:http://srph.it/9pjHNn

Even T/S has the power to generate the same insecurity that traditional media layoffs created. In such times, you return to the music of the evening pines. Maybe that’s why people love to read about Shangri-La.

From outside my window, I can see a riot of colors as the first spring flowers are still in bloom.  An evening rain has cleared the sky, a few reluctant clouds still hang from mountain tops like a sulking child. Today is full moon and Buddha Parinirvana, Lord Buddha’s birthday. People, young and old, dressed in their best attire are returning home after visiting monasteries. Life is Good!!!

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The current Dalai Lama (left), as a young adult, meets with Mao Zedong (right) at the National Peoples Congress in 1954. Five years later the Dalai Lama would flee. A meeting between the two offices has not occurred since. (AP Photo)

This week, the Dalai Lama told a Manhattan gathering that he is a “Marxist”, half-a-century after he fled his homeland of Tibet, following occupation by Chinese Communists.

“Still I am a Marxist,” the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader said in New York, where he arrived with an entourage of robed monks and a heavy security detail to give a series of paid public lectures.

Marxism has “moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits”, the Dalai Lama, 74, said, reported ABC News.

But taking a middle path, the world’s most famous Buddhist monk did not forget to credit the Chinese version of capitalism.

Capitalism “brought a lot of positive to China. Millions of people’s living standards improved”, he said.

But will his love affair with Marx help the cause of thousands of Tibetan refugees expecting to go back home one day?

After his exile, the Dalai Lama has followed a policy of traveling to capitals of Western European countries and to the United States to garner support for the cause. Hollywood stars like Richard Gere are his followers. But tinsel town’s sympathy has only proved counterproductive, Historian Patrick French who wrote Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land said at the first Indo-Bhutan literary festival in Thimphu on Wednesday.

“They (Tibetan refugees) thought popular pressure could sway the Chinese,” he said.

In a 2008 March op-ed in the New York Times Patrick French wrote:

The International Campaign for Tibet, based in Washington, is now a more powerful and effective force on global opinion than the Dalai Lama’s outfit in northern India. The European and American pro-Tibet organizations are the tail that wags the dog of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

These groups hate criticism almost as much as the Chinese government does. Some use questionable information. For example, the Free Tibet Campaign in London (of which I am a former director) and other groups have long claimed that 1.2 million Tibetans have been killed by the Chinese since they invaded in 1950. However, after scouring the archives in Dharamsala while researching my book on Tibet, I found that there was no evidence to support that figure. The question that Nancy Pelosi and celebrity advocates like Richard Gere ought to answer is this: Have the actions of the Western pro-Tibet lobby over the last 20 years brought a single benefit to the Tibetans who live inside Tibet, and if not, why continue with a failed strategy?

Patrick French said the Dalai Lama “should have closed down the Hollywood strategy a decade ago and focused on back-channel diplomacy with Beijing.”

An ethnic Tibetan friend tells me that it would not be a good idea for the Dalai Lama to call himself a Marxist. “He may be trying to say that he has no ideological clash with the Chinese government, but people may not understand it.”

The Dalai Lama’s love affair with Marxism is not a new thing. For the September 27, 1999, issue of the Time magazine, he wrote:

Tibet at that time was very, very backward. The ruling class did not seem to care, and there was much inequality. Marxism talked about an equal and just distribution of wealth. I was very much in favor of this. Then there was the concept of self-creation. Marxism talked about self-reliance, without depending on a creator or a God. That was very attractive. I had tried to do some things for my people, but I did not have enough time. I still think that if a genuine communist movement had come to Tibet, there would have been much benefit to the people.

Instead, the Chinese communists brought Tibet a so-called “liberation.” These people were not implementing true Marxist policy. If they had been, national boundaries would not be important to them. They would have worried about helping humanity. Instead, the Chinese communists carried out aggression and suppression in Tibet. Whenever there was opposition, it was simply crushed. They started destroying monasteries and killing and arresting lamas.

The Dalai Lama’s Buddhist position of accepting the goodness in everything has not really worked well in dealing with the Chinese. Apart from enthralling a handful of hip, new-agey Marxists in the West, his comments cannot be expected to help the Tibetans unless he starts talking of raw, real politics.

Thanks to computers, it has been ages since I have edited something on paper.

But this photograph from the White House Flicker makes me grab a sheet of paper, and start striking words, drawing arrows and circling phrases.

In my part of the world, where we look up to the West as a source of all goodness, President Obama has been the best thing that has happened. In the photo you see Obama and speech writer Favreau edits a speech.

Obama, has been an inspiration to the Eastern world for the following things:

1. We (people of South Asian descent) are making a concerted effort to speak better English, thanks to Obama speeches, so that we are not objects of the white man’s  dinner table ridicule.

2. The photograph of him editing the speech will make us realize that it is not very bad to use pen and paper. Laptop-enabled South Asians complain about how difficult it is to write with pen these days.

3. You can have time and the courage to hug and look jealously at your wife even if you are the busiest person on earth.

For people like me who work with words, point number 2 is worth considering.

Hank Stuever of the Washington Post writes in his blog about the photograph.

A photo like this is thrilling, gratifying and also terribly frightening to anyone who delivers his or her own writing to an editor. (Or a group of editors.) I wonder how this picture makes other people feel. I see it and feel a swelling of pride — not in the president so much as in the hard work that goes into good writing.

But I also get a lurching feeling in my stomach. I have marked up my own drafts like this, and, when invited, I have done the same for other writers. (Though probably not to this extent.) I certainly have received manuscript pages back from George Hodgman that looked like this.

When it comes back to you in this condition, you have to take a deep breath and just deal with each mark, one by one.

At the Washington Post, we don’t edit on paper. The equivalent to this picture would be to come over to your editor’s desk and see your story up on his or her screen, filled with “red notes,” sort of like the edit-track function in Microsoft Word. Questions are in red. Cuts are in red. Suggestions for rewrites are in red. My eye is trained to immediately look for instances of red; only once, on an edit with Henry Allen several years ago, did I open the file and see more red than black. (Which turned out to be false panic — most of the red was actually a long note from Henry after the lead paragraph suggesting that I veered off in the wrong direction.)

Members of the Dongria Kondh tribe dance in a trance during a ceremony on top of the Niyamgiri mountain, which they worship as their living god, to protest against plans by Vedanta Resources to mine bauxite from that mountain (REUTERS/Reinhard Krause)

When Boa (85), the last speaker of one of the world’s oldest dialect died early last month, it attracted international headlines. One site had a video of her singing in the language spoken in  the  Andaman Islands of India.

Apart from such ‘quirky’ events, the plight of the 68 million tribals of India, known as adivasis (meaning original inhabitants), rarely get any news coverage. But the James Cameron movie, Avatar, gave chance to around 8,000 tribals in an impoverished part of  northern India to speak for their rights.

The real life story is being played out in the Indian state of Orissa where the Dondgria Tribe is in a fight against London listed Vendanta Reources, a mining giant. The ‘Navi’ of India wants the company to stop mining plans from a ’sacred mountain’  from where Vedanta plans to extract 78m tons of bauxite.

The  Avatar angle helped the issue generate much interest which all began with short documentary ‘Mine: Story of a Sacred Mountain‘ by British actress Joanna Lumley.

“These rocks are the reason our children can live here. Because of these the rains come. The winter comes, the wind comes, the mountain brings all the water. If they take away these rocks we all die. We will lose our soul. Niyamgiri is our soul,” a tribe member says in the documentary.

“The fundamental story of Avatar — if you take away the multi-coloured lemurs, the long-trunked horses and warring androids — is being played out today in Niyamgiri mountain in India’s Orissa state,” said Stephen Corry, director of the British charity, Survival International.

“Like the Na’vi of Avatar, the Dongria Kondh tribe are also at risk.”

Vedanta says its mine would not violate the rights of indigenous tribespeople, saying that all its projects are conducted within the law and using international best practices: reports Reuters.

Early last month a Variety magazine carried an advertisement about the documentary appealed to James Cameron: ‘Please help the Dongria. We’ve watched your film – now watch ours.’

Even the tabloid, The Sun reported the struggle against Vedanta.

Concern over the behaviour of Vedanta – a FTSE 100 company – has led some high-profile investors to abandon the firm. The Church of England sold shares worth £3.8million, saying in a statement: “We are not satisfied Vedanta has shown, or is likely in future to show, the level of respect for human rights and local communities that we expect of companies in whom the Church investing bodies hold shares.”

The Time article suggesting the final war in Avatar talks about what might happen to hill people in their fight against a corporate giant.

Near the end of the film, the Na’vi fight a long and heroic battle with a corporate militia to save their sacred forest. In real life, a violent conflict is unlikely to end well for the Dongria. The state of Orissa has become an active recruiting ground for an armed Maoist insurgency that, in other states, is growing ever more aggressive. Nationwide, the death toll from the insurgency rose 36% last year to 1,125. Despite rumors and a few unconfirmed media reports, activists who work with the Dongria deny that the Maoists have any presence within the community. The Dongria’s battle has been peaceful so far, and any hint of Maoist influence would quickly draw the force of the state police and paramilitaries, who are in the middle of a months-long anti-Maoist offensive. While the Dongria possess bows and arrows, they “are not violent people,” says Samantara. “But if the government uses violence, they will retaliate. That is my biggest fear.” If the helicopters head into the Dongria Kondh’s abode, there won’t be any fearsome, winged Ikran swooping in to save them.

Late Pastor Samuel Skariah Marutayathu with his son, daughter and wife. A photograph taken at a South Indian Studio when the camera was an American Dream

Dear Papachi,

After I had signed papers to put you back on the ventilator, the doctors did not let anyone in. That morning, lying amid machines and tubes that criss-crossed your body, you said, “Get me a mirror.”

You died that evening on the fifth floor of the hospital run by the hugging saint’s trust. It was March 2, 2008.

I know I am late, because I want to set this record straight. You were angry that moment when you asked for the mirror, and several nights over the past two years, you had woken me up just to argue with me throughout the night. Because of you, I have been late to office several times,  until a Buddhist monk friend in Bhutan told me to tell you the next time you visit, “Don’t argue.”

But even if you had asked me with that voice – the deep missionary baritone of yours that had proclaimed Jesus is coming soon – I would not have been perturbed like the many you had baptized. How could you die in peace, if you knew the rich dark beard that laughed at the simple follies of my mother, was shaven off by nurses to paste and stitch many wires that ran to money making machines.

I have always seen my father with a beard. I didn’t want to shatter that thought in you, “My son has never seen me without my majestic beard.”

You haven’t told me, you have been too proud to admit that. But your wife, and daughter –my mother and sister – had told me you never wanted to look weak before your son.

Do you remember the last football game you played? That was before I was born.  You were the star on the field. But a careless dribble buckled you down. You limped all your life from that day, except for the last eight days in bed. As a child, I remember your futile attempts to attach a thicker sole to the right shoe so that your limp was not very visible.

You were hurt, but didn’t tell me anything, when the neighbor asked me to imitate how you walked. I walked on just one slipper and demonstrated to an applauding audience. Mummy was waiting at the courtyard of our small mud-tiled house with a guava stick. You didn’t scold me because; you didn’t want to know you were hurt.

Another information: Maruti 800, India’s largest selling car, is stopping production. When you knew we didn’t have enough money to buy the favorite car of yours which you hired for my sister’s wedding, you were willing to be satisfied with a Maruti 800, the cheapest car in India. More than anything, this is my biggest regret. We never had the money to buy it. And they call it the people’s car.

A few of your pastor friends, whose children could fly to America or England and earn better money, had pitied your inability to buy a car. One of them didn’t stop when you asked for a lift. Another, after his weekly sermon, asked me how much I was earning a month. I was a rookie reporter then.

“Rs 2,500 (around US$ 60 a decade back),” I said. The pastor then detailed how much his daughter, a class mate of mine, was earning then abroad. By the way, he had a car then.

The Seventh-Day Adventist church in my part of India had been talking about the American Dream for almost a century. If you get a visa to the United States, you are blessed by God, that was the general message.

It was in the heat of this, that, as a 16-year-old, you accompanied me to enroll me in college. I had enough marks to join a Science and Mathematics course which would have made me a doctor or engineer and gained me a passport to the American blessings.

“You son wants to join humanities. Tell him he will do good in Science,” the college principal told my father. Hundreds of students were waiting outside for a Science seat.

But I was sure I will do bad in Science. Though I had marks, I was afraid of the subject.

“I leave it up to him,” you told the principal. That day I joined millions of students who had taken dry arts. You were hurt that I didn’t satisfy the American dream. But you respected my decision.

When I started reading literature that you thought was anti-Bible, you didn’t ask me to stop it. But we argued long into nights whether the world was made in six days.

One politically volatile afternoon,  I stormed with hundreds of other students carrying flags, shouting slogans as armed police readied to pounce any moment. You didn’t stop me. You followed the agitated procession, managing yourself with difficulty on the tiny scooter. That night, we had an argument on the rights and wrongs of life. You didn’t chastise me for not subscribing to your political beliefs. We just argued fiercely, as a worried mom looked on.

I have heard you shouting at mom for allowing too much ‘free thought’ at home.

I know you would not agree to this. But it was she, a simple school cashier, who bought me all those Russian classics  on an installment basis and wanted her son to become a man of letters.

However, let me tell you this now, two years after I escorted your still body to the mortuary in our little town.

While mom bought me books that kept me home, you took me to out to the world. Clasping my tiny legs around your neck, I sat on your shoulders munching crackers, as you clapped to a speech by Rajiv Gandhi, who became the Indian prime minister after his mother’s assassination. As a small child I don’t remember arguing with you. But you were my hero. You had regular discussions to your five year old son about in-fighting in the Indian National Congress. You shook hands with political leaders, and I watched in awe. Inspired, I once led a procession around the house with a banana leaf as a flag; my three-year-old sister was the only follower, shouting my praises.  Remember, the tiny arguments we had on who took the front page of the morning newspaper and dashed to the toilet first.

You believed in the boys don’t cry theory. You lived up to it. But I have seen you cry once. It was when, you walked with the coffin of my mother’s elder brother, who first told me, as a six-year old, that I can become a writer.

And then, the day before you left this world: were you crying? You couldn’t talk, as you were under heavy medication and on a ventilator. But as we held out arms, your heart beat rose, the machines said. Your eyes welled, the machines couldn’t say why.

Today, I participated in a meditation, almost an hour of silence.

I thought about you.

I know you would be angry if you knew I participated in a non-Christian meditation.

If you are angry, then come tonight. Let’s argue, I can be late to the office tomorrow.

See you soon,

Your son,

aby

PS: Born December 1, 1953, late Pastor Samuel Skariah Marutayathu, a senior minister of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in India, was a trade union leader of the Indian National Congress before he took the spiritual path. He is survived by his son, daughter and wife.

But a new iPhone app launched last week, aptly named TigerText will ensure that no jealous spouse will chase you with a club.

Text messages sent from the app will neither be saved nor can they be forwarded. After a set time the text will vanish into thin air.

It works like this: when, say, a prominent politician sends his mistress an iPhone message via TigerText, the mistress will be prompted to install the app. When she has done so, she can read the message, but she can’t keep it. In fact, the message is never actually sent to her phone; it’s stored on TigerText’s servers. After the politician’s specified time span has elapsed — anywhere from one minute to five days — the message ceases to exist. There’s even a “delete on read” setting, which counts down from 60 after a message is opened and erases its text at zero.

Cover of Shame: A Novel

Protests that erupted over an article by controversial writer Taslima Nasreen killed two people in the south Indian state of Karnataka on Monday. The article, translated and published in a local language newspaper, said Prophet Muhammad did not approve of wearing the burqa.

But Nasreen told Reuters that the appearance of the article was “atrocious.”

She added: “In any of my writings I have never mentioned that Prophet Muhammad was against burkha (Muslim veil).”

Read what the author who had to flee her native Bangladesh wrote in another article:

There are many views on why and how the Islamic purdah started. One view has it that Prophet Mohammed became very poor after spending all the wealth of his first wife. At that time, in Arabia, the poor had to go to the open desert and plains for relieving themselves and even their sexual needs. The Prophet’s wives too had to do the same. He had told his wives that “I give you permission to go out and carry out your natural work”. (Bukhari Hadis first volume book 4 No. 149). And this is what his wives started doing accordingly. One day, Prophet Mohammed’s disciple Uman complained to him that these women were very uncomfortable because they were instantly recognisable while relieving themselves.
Umar proposed a cover but Prophet Mohammed ignored it. Then the Prophet asked Allah for advice and he laid down the Ayat (33:59) (Bukhari Hadis Book 026 No. 5397).

This is the history of the purdah, according to the Hadis. But the question is: since Arab men too relieved themselves in the open, why didn’t Allah start the purdah for men? Clearly, Allah doesn’t treat men and women as equals, else there would be purdah for both! Men are higher than women. So women have to be made walking prisons and men can remain free birds.

This is from her website:

Inasmuch as she had become a best-selling author in Bangladesh and West Bengal in  India, she managed to survive the hostility. The government, however, banned Lajja (Shame), in which she described the atrocities against Hindu minorities by Muslim  fundamentalists, her main message being “Let humanism be the other name of religion.”

According to Taslima, the religious scriptures are out of  time, out of place. Instead of religious laws, she maintains, what is needed is a uniform civil code that accords women equality and justice. Her views caused fourteen different political and non-political religious organizations to unite for the first time, starting violent demonstrations, calling   general strikes, blocking government offices, and demanding her immediate execution by hanging.

The government, instead of taking action against the fundamentalists, turned against her. A case was filed charging that she hurt people’s religious feelings, and a non-bail-able arrest warrant was issued. Deeming prison to be an extremely unsafe place, Taslima went into hiding.

Meanwhile, this week,  Danish newspaper Politiken has  apologized for the 2008 cartoon  depicting Prophet Muhammad donning a bomb-shaped turban.