“For every rational Indian born every day, two ‘gau rakshaks’ arrive the same day”

Jawed Naqvi, the excellent Delhi correspondent of the Dawn, Pakistan:

“I am not a superstitious person and have no faith in Zodiac signs. In fact, let me confess, when a certain Gulf daily I worked for ran out of money one day I thoroughly enjoyed my duties as the stone-sub, lifting bromides from the previous year’s horoscope for the newspaper’s most popular and most irrelevant page.

“None noticed the penury-driven faux pas as life continued in its sing-song-now-and-turbulent-the-next-moment way.

“One cannot divide billions of people into 12 silly categories, their lives determined by gemstones and colours to wear or avoid.

“In fact, the way the dice are loaded since at least three years for Indians, for every person of reason born on a given day there would be two or more gaurakshaks (cow protectors) arriving bang on that very moment.”

Read the full article: Parched before the arriving rains

Photograph: courtesy Dawn