[Reader-list] Soul shampoo

[Tapas Ray]

Could not resist sending this along. Edward Luce is a Financial Times 
correspondent who has written a book after a five-year tour of duty in 
India. The excerpt below is from its review in the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/books/review/Macintyre.t.html?8bu&emc=bu
Luce, who is married to an Indian woman, treads carefully, most particularly 
when visiting the cow product research center at Nagpur. He is taken 
barefoot to inspect the holy cows in their stalls, past the bottles of cow 
urine promising to cure everything from cancer to obesity, and the cow-dung 
anti-dandruff shampoo. "All of these recipes are contained in the holy 
texts," he is told. Luce's amused discomfort - not only because he is 
standing up to his ankles in bovine effluent - is extreme, but he maintains 
a politeness that is exquisitely British. When invited to smell the leaves 
of fruit trees fertilized with the enriched biomass of the sacred cow, he 
declares: "This seemed very pleasant. And for all the science I know perhaps 
cow's urine really can cure cancer."