Presumptuous Principal Plasters People with Pee for Purification

India is a nation on the rise. Fifty years ago, or so, India first gained its independence from Great Britain, and has come to be a major leader in software development and on-line software troubleshooting. India has a budding space exploration program, a nuclear weapons cache, an advanced army, a huge population, and, evidently, some of the most primitive beliefs you can imagine.

According to the All Headline News, there is a group of students and parents that are very angry about the beliefs of one school principal in particular. It appears that the school had previously employed a teacher that was from one of the lower castes in India. Yes, I am referring to the same set of castes that no longer exist, officially. When that teacher left the school, the higher-caste principal came by the room and purified the class.

Got Pee?

He purified the class with cow urine by splattering them with it.

He then informed the class that the whole insane escapade was “for their own good.” From the eyes of a westerner, this incident has more than a couple of issues to complicate matters. There is a belief system there called “Ayurveda,” which is supposed to be a healing system. Basically, in this belief system there is the idea that cow urine can cure a person from, obesity, liver disease, evil spirits, and a myriad of other ailments. For me, that is issue number one. I have lived around cows. My family grew them to eat them. We most certainly did not grow them to splatter ourselves, bathe in, or otherwise consume, use or sell their urine. In the west, we learned that there were these little bugs running around in things like urine that actually create problems. They are called germs.

Another issue I have with this incident is the fact that this was supposed to be an educator. He is the principal, in fact. Nominally, he is the head instructor. Not only did he believe that people are born with different kinds of worth (castes), but he also still believed in the healthy application of cow piss to drive off evil spirits that lower caste people could bring.

Now, the US is not perfect. We have some pretty outdated ideas about education ourselves, such as the notion that the more we test our kids the smarter they become. A lot of us still believe that taking prayer out of schools is healthy, giving condoms to 6^th graders is a good idea, and you can make kids avoid drugs by having a cop come by and show them what drugs on the street look like. (I can still remember when that happened in our school. We were happy that someone came by and showed us what the real stuff was, how to tell oregano from pot, and how you could identify the real valium from fakes, and so forth.)

Even with all of that, I can only imagine what would have happened if Mr. Halsey had come by one of our classrooms and splattered us with cow piss. That stuff stinks, and our little town was still rural enough that most of us would have known right away what he had thrown on us. I am pretty sure that my Dad would have considered a non-legal solution to something like that. In west Texas, it would have gone by the name of a “healthy ass-kicking.”

Now, I have to give kudos to the people of this little Indian village. Once they learned that the Principal was nothing more than a bigoted, ignorant reprobate, they called the police and have demanded a written apology. Good for them. The police, however, have yet to take any kind of action. It makes you wonder what kind of clout that the age-old system of castes still has in India.