However, a significant percentage of people will spend in on a hobby, like Photography. They’ll buy equipment like lenses, cameras and bags worth thousands and thousands of rupees. And what is the end result? Pictures. I didn’t get this, so I decided to ask a photography-enthusiast friend, Drinivas, to understand what is going on.

Me: “Why do you click so many pictures?”

“It’s awesome. Just look at how beautiful the landscape is here”, he said, showing me pictures from his most recent “photo walk”.

Why don’t you just do a Google Image search for “beautiful landscapes”? You’ll get so many pictures that are just as beautiful.

“It’s not the same thing!” the friend says, shrugging me off. “This is my creation. My name is on this picture.”

“You can just Photoshop the Google Image results, you know, and put your name on the picture. Problem solved!”

“You can’t do that. There is so much beauty out there. I want to capture it.”

“I thought it was inner beauty that was important?”

After several failed attempts at communicating the value of clicking your own pictures, Drinivas decided that he should  show me the beauty of the world out there, and invited me to one of these Photo-walks.

Drinivas: “Lets do a photo walk. Why don’t we go to Cubbon park at dawn tomorrow?”

Me: “Dawn? What’s that… like 9:30 am?”

Drinivas: “BE THERE AT 6AM”

Me: “That’s disturbing!”

A warning to all readers: A photo walk is NOT where hot fashion models walk on a ramp to get their photos taken, as any normal person would expect. Instead, it is a group of photo-nerds walking about, clicking pictures of bees, drains and flowers. I learned this AFTER I showed up at the photo walk, which is unfortunate, because I was really looking forward to some fashion.

I’d bought a point-and-shoot camera with me – You know, one of those cheap Cannon cameras that fit in my shirt pocket. As everyone had assembled,, they started the ritual unpacking on their camera bags. They were taking out these huge lenses, some as big as a cricket bat. Following the extraction of the lenses from the bags, the next step, I deduced, was to screw everything together, which was another long and interesting ritual. It was like watching the old-timers deal with these giant computing machines, and I was eager to show off to these folks that they make cameras much smaller now, like the one I have in my pocket.

“You know, they make cameras smaller these days” I said loudly to the group in general, taking out my credit-card-sized camera. “They even fit in your shirt pocket, so you don’t have to carry around a huge bag for your camera!”

There was a collective gasp from the group. They all suddenly went silent. Everyone was staring at me.

What had I done now?

“Put that tiny thing back in your pocket!” he growled to me.  There were hushed whispers all around, like they had just seen Voldemort.

“What?” I said to Drinivas. “What just happened?”

“You can’t bring a small camera here. You’re embarrassing me. Here, use my spare camera”, Drinivas said, handing me a 3-foot-long camera-plus-lens contraption.

“Why? I like my Camera!” I protested, but he shoved the huge thing into my face.

I lugged around the camera, which must have weighed like 200 Kgs. Each time we came across an “interesting” site – Like a bird or a puddle of water on the road, the whole group would gather around furiously clicking pictures. I tried to click pictures of a couple of birds, but by the time I set up the camera and configured all the settings and did the focusing etc… etc.., the bird had decided that it couldn’t wait around for me to get my act together, and it flew away.

The whole photo walk was a disappointing experience for me, mainly because all my pictures looked like they were clicked by a arthritic monkey. Drinivas, however, seemed to do OK. Check out his pictures here.

I still maintain doing a Google search for “bird pictures” is easier than waking up at 5 AM and chasing after impatient birds.

Big, BIG mistake.

People inexperienced in the art of gifting will often make serious mistakes, but a blunder of this scale is going to haunt him a lifetime. To understand why this is a massive mistake, read on.

You see, the ritual of gift giving is really an exercise in expectations management. The main problem with gifting is expectations escalation – If you give a gift of a certain value to your better half, then the expectation of a gift of greater value is automatically generated for the next year, which is a spiral that can only end in pain and suffering. Similar to Moore’s law in the field of computers that says that processing power doubles every 18 months, I have invented The Pointless Law of Gift Management, which states that “The expectations of the value of a gift doubles every year”. If the expectations are not actively managed, then the they can quickly escalate into unmanageable levels, resulting in the aforementioned pain and suffering.

Let us illustrate this with the example of my friend, who bought the Galaxy S II phone. He bought this as an engagement gift, which will raise the expectations of a wedding gift to a trip for two to Greece. If that is the wedding gift, then the first anniversary gift will have to be a diamond necklace, which will require the 2nd anniversary gift to be a trip on a private jet. By the time the 3rd anniversary comes around, my friend will need to buy Sri Lanka and gift it to his fiancee for her expectations to be met. I don’t think he’s going to be able to buy Sri Lanka, at which point the expectations will come crashing down, resulting in a lot of pain and suffering for my friend.

But don’t worry, my fellow compatriots. I have figured out a way out of this conundrum. The key is the first gift. It has to be cheap enough, so that the increase in expectations of the value will be offset by inflation, resulting in the same real value for the gift for eternity. Clever, eh?

I have taken my own advice in this area. The first gift I bought The Girlfriend was a keychain. Which was followed by a Masala Dosa the next year, followed up with the thoughtful gift of a Nickname the next year and so on. As you can see, The Wife’s expectations of gift are so lowered, that for the next year, even if I buy her a litre of petrol for her car, she’ll be very pleased with me.

Coming back to my friend – There’s no real way out for him. His only option is to cut his losses, and take the hit of pain and suffering right now, so that the expectations for the rest of his life can be managed properly. I would recommend that he gift her half-a-bar of snickers as a wedding present, which will reset her expectations back to a manageable level. Otherwise, he’s looking at a painful 3rd anniversary.

If Rahul has 20 mangoes and then he eats 10 of them and borrows 4 more and eats them too, then what does he have?

The correct answer, of course, is that Rahul has indigestion, but the teachers will never accept that answer. Plus, the teachers that actually teach maths seem to uniformly have some sort of boredom-inducing speech pattern, and the poor little kids have no defense to the boredom spell that the maths teachers cast.

But the reality is so different – Maths is filled with wild characters and soap-opera style dramas that the textbooks keep well hidden from the kids for reasons that I can’t understand. Take the example of Mr. Blaise Pascal. Text books portray him as this stuffy professor type character, but his closest modern day counterpart is probably Paris Hilton. Pascal was a gambler more than anything else. In his day, the concept of luck was attributed to the Gods, and there was no concept of probabilities. Gamblers believed that the Gods had blessed them if they won in a game of chance. Pascal, who was a rebel, decided that he was going to cheat the Gods by experimenting with the games of chance! He pushed the field of mathematics into probability theory. Not because he wanted to write a research paper or anything like that, but because he wanted to screw the other gamblers and take all their money.

After getting into a bunch of fights with other gamblers who were convinced he was somehow cheating, Pascal apparently had a religious vision (he was probably high at the time), and went to church, which was the rehab of his era. He tried to seek Gods forgiveness in church, got bored after a while and went back to gambling. He got into another bunch of fights, including a hindi-soap-opera style fight with his sister over his family’s wealth. And then went back to church. And back into gambling, and then back again into church. He probably went in-and-out of rehab as much as Paris Hilton.

At his death bed, Pascal was completely torn between God and his work with probability theory. He invented the now-infamous Pascal’s wager argument which made a round-about probability-theory based argument for why he’s a believer and why God will forgive him. If there was a talk-show in his day, he would be like that crazy rockstar guest who’s blabbering on about something that no one else can understand.

Tell me this story is not interesting to 10-year old kids! Why can’t teachers tell kids these stories? There’s far more soap-opera gold in the world of maths and science. Like the epic mudfight between Newton and Leibniz over who invented calculus and George Cantor, who literally went mad trying to figure out the concept of Infinity because he thought God was hiding behind it.

I think maths and science should be taught like soap-operas. If that doesn’t interest kids, I don’t know what will.

The One-Hand-Pitch-Catch Out

This rule was born out of necessity because some of the older guys would never get out, and kept hitting the ball over our heads. To counter that, we used the one-hand-pitch-catch rule. This meant that a batsman could be out even if the fielder caught the ball after one bounce, but he had to use only one hand. Also, the ball bouncing off of trees, parked cars and uncles that were walking by did not count as a “pitch”. Our street had lots of trees, so we’d run around like monkeys waiting for mangoes to fall off the tree when a ball was hit into it, in the hope of catching it as it falls.

The-Ball-Is-Too-Fast-Appeal-And-Subsequent-Fight

Occasionally, the batsman would complain that a bowler threw the ball too fast, the bowler would deny it and invoke the “your-guy-did-it-too” argument, which would subsequently deteriorate into name calling and hurtling of various other multi-lingual abuses. Eventually though, the argument would be settled, and just as the bowler was about to throw the next ball, he’d ask “So what’s the score?”. Unfortunately, because of the previous argument, everyone would have forgotten what the score was, and the inquiry regarding what it is would lead to yet another argument with the same set of name calling and multi-lingual abuses.

Direct-Hit into House is Out

This rule was forced upon us by the next-door uncle, who’s window we hit one too many times. The other problem was that if the ball went into a house, someone had to jump the compound to get the ball back, which was a decidedly boring thing to do. Eventually, we agreed that the batsman that hit the ball into a house was responsible for getting it back, unless it went into the house with the dogs, in which case the kid from that house got it back, but he got double batting the next time.

Batting-side-Wicket-keeper and the Traitor Conundrum

Because we would never have enough players, the batting side would usually supply the wicket keeper. Normally, this is not a problem, but as soon as the batsman nicked a ball into the hands of the wicket keeper, and he caught it, the trouble would start. There would be a strong accusation that the wicket keeper was a traitor for actually holding on to the catch, which would cause the bowling side to come to the defense of the wicket keeper, causing even more accusations of him being a double-agent and a spy. This would often times lead to the wicketkeeper to defect teams, leading to an imbalance  in the number of players on each team, and could only be set right by the creation of the position of the infamous “Joker”.

The Glass-Break Run-Away Protocol

This was the only time when all the kids would come together – When someone eventually broke a glass window. The protocol of reaction in this situation was clear and well communicated. First, the wicket keeper was responsible for taking the stumps out and running away with them. The batsman was responsible for holding on to the bat for 3 days, since we’d not be allowed to play in the street for 3 days while the dust settles down. All of us would form small groups, and each group would run off into the closest house, turning on Cartoon Network, and mass-pretending like everyone was watching TV the whole time. The ball, of course, is disowned and sacrificed in order to protect our identities.Eventually, the parents would come around with the ball trying to find out who the owner of the ball was so that the kid could be punished, but we were prepared for that. Each ball that we bought was immediately inscribed with the name of a non-existent kid. Planning ahead pays!

Those were the magical days!

I’ve always suspected that what they tell us about how airplanes fly is some sort of messed up conspiracy. I mean, think about it. Airplanes are basically flying tubes of aluminum, hurtling through -50 degree C air, at close to the speed of sound, held up with nothing but wind. I mean, does that even seem possible to you?

I first began suspecting this in school, when our physics teacher was explaining to us how airplanes fly.

Teacher: “…and that’s how the shape of the wing creates “lift”, a force that pushes upwards, lifting an airplane into the sky.”
I put my hand up, and the teacher called on me.
Me: “Ma’am, so airplanes fly because of the shape of their wings?”
Teacher: “Yes!”
Me: “Then how do missiles fly through the air? They have only tiny fins, and are not ‘wing’ shaped at all”
Teacher: “Hmm… let me see… what does the text book say?…”
Me: “Also, how come fighter planes can fly upside down?”
Teacher: “What?”
Me: “If the wings are upside down, then the “lift” should also be downwards. There will be nothing to keep the plane in the air. How come it doesn’t come crashing down?”
Teacher: “Err…. You silly boy. Always making trouble in class. Get out and go to the principal’s office!”

You see? There is no way a plane can be held up with the wind. I mean, do you know how hard it is to lift a 20Kg rock? How can just the wind lift a 400,000Kg airplane? Not possible. Also, an airplane takes off at 200 kmph, but how come a F1 car going at 350 kmph doesn’t fly off into the sky?See? SEE? It’s all lies the evil government has been feeding you.

Airplanes have become such a common occurrence these days that people don’t think about it anymore. But if you tried to explain how airplanes work to a 16-th century British gentleman, (let’s call him Gentleman Williams), you’d see how absurd you sound.

Gentleman Williams: “So this airplane that you talk about – It flies because of the wind?”
Me: “Yes, the wind blowing over the wings creates lift…”
Gentleman Williams: “Kind Sir, are you implying that if I blow at you, you will start flying too?”
Me: “Err… No, I mean, you have to blow at a wing”
Gentleman Williams: “Like these delicious chicken wings?”
Me: “…I mean, probably, but…”
Gentleman William: “Dear Sir, are you suggesting that one can make a chicken fly high in the sky simply by putting it in front of a fan?”
Me: “…that’s what they tell me…”
Gentleman Williams: “I’m afraid to inform you, kind sir, that someone has been yanking your chain. They’ve made quite the fool out of you!”

I think the real reasons airplanes fly is that there are some alien insects holding up the airplane from under the wings. That’s why they make you sit above the wings in airplanes – So you never see what’s really under it. It’s probably some secret government program to protect the aliens from extra-terrestrial bug-spray or something.

Don’t blindly believe the explanation the government has been feeding you all these years. It’s a giant conspiracy. Ask for the truth!

Think about this the next time you’re in an airplane.

I had been cornered into an intellectual showdown with a ceiling fan, and it was fighting dirty. I mean, the ceiling fan was all dirty, and the The Wife had “persuaded” me to clean the ceiling fan in preparation for having the in-laws over for dinner the next day.

The only problem was that I really really didn’t want to do this dumb chore, but my previous arguments against why a ceiling fan should not be cleaned had been conclusively disproved. Unfortunately there was nothing that I could do about it, and the prospect of standing on a chair with a upside-down broom was looming large on my mind.

At that very instant, a brilliant plan came to me. Isn’t it fantastic how, when faced with the prospect of doing household chores, my brain comes up with these highly brilliant and innovative plans? What the apple hitting his head was to Newton, being asked to do chores by The Wife is to me – Inspiration!

Anyway, onto the plan. The awesome thing about fans is that they go round-and-round, so the cleaning device doesn’t really have to go round too. All I had to do was to hold up the broom to the fan, and the fan would go around, cleaning itself. Furthermore, I didn’t have to hold the broom either. I could just duct-tape it to the chair, turn on the fan, and 10 minutes later… taadaaa… A beautiful clean ceiling fan!

There was a small hiccup though – The broom, when ductaped to the chair was not long enough to reach the fan, so I had to introduce my star-wars light-saber in the middle. But soon after, the contraption was ready. And boy, did it look beautiful – It looked like a weapon fit for a Jedi. As I was proudly admiring my cleaning robot, The Wife walked by.

The Wife: “What the hell are you doing?”

Me: “Check it out. It’s the Ceiling Fan Self Cleaning Jedi Robot – CFSCJR. You pronounce it ceef-sco-jar”

The Wife: “Why is that thing hanging off the fan?”

Me: “No, no. It’s going to clean the fan.”

The Wife: “This THING is a bad idea”

Me: “It has a name. Please address it as The Ceef-sco-jar”

The Wife: “And how exactly is that thing…?”

Me: “…The Ceef-sco-jar…”

The Wife: “…going to clean the fan?”

Me: “Oh, it’s quite simple. I’ve attached the Ceef-sco-jar to the chair with duct tape, and now we’ll turn on the fan. As the fan rotates, it will clean it automatically. Brilliant no?”

The Wife: “This is a bad idea”

Me: “Maybe I should get a patent on it. I could be a millionaire!”

The Wife at this point gives up, and goes off. Ha! When she returns, she’s going to see a spic-and-span fan, and she’s going to be so sorry she doubted my invention. And then I’m going to say to her: “See, SEE! I TOLD YOU SO!” and it’s going to be epic!

Time to start The Ceef-sco-jar! I turn on the fan’s switch, and it slowly starts turning. The broom makes first contact with the blade, and as the face of the fan brushes past the broom, there’s a clean patch on it. Just like in the Tide TV Ad! Oh Yeah! Success! Hahahohohahaa… I’m doing my evil genius laugh!

The fan gathers up speed, and the Ceef-sco-jar is doing its job rather well! Just as I’m swelling up with pride, the stupid ceiling fan gets the broom stuck with it. Oops… The fan is picking up speed, and the hairy brush of the broom has gotten stuck in the fan’s blades. The whole Ceef-sco-jar starts vibrating violently. The fan picks up even more speed, and now it has picked up the chair as well. It’s wildly swinging the chair like only a maniac ceiling fan could. This ceiling fan is deranged! The chair is now rotating wildly in the living room, until it breaks free and…

*Crash*

…a moment of silence…

*Bigger Crash*

The Wife rushes into the living room. She looks up to the ceiling fan, which has come dislodged from the ceiling, and is hanging by a thin wire. Still stuck to it is the broom. The lightsabre is lodged into the sofa, and one of the chair’s legs is lodged into the TV, who’s LCD panel has cracked.

The Wife gives me The Look™

Me: “Good news! We’re going to get a new TV!”

What happened in the next few minutes has been censored in the interest of my own safety. Plus, I had to look up some of the words that were used subsequently, since it was the first time I’d heard of them. There was also some multi-lingual name calling that I had to look up in two separate dictionaries.

Anywho, that’s the story of how I got a brand new flat-screen TV.

Also, we don’t clean ceiling fans anymore.

The Wife: “Do you want to clean the ceiling fans?”
Me: “Not one bit”

And I returned my nose back into the adventures of Asterix, just as he was about to thrash up Julius Ceaser’s bodyguards. The comic book was suddenly snatched from my hands.

The Wife: “Let me rephrase… I need you to clean the ceiling fan.”
Me: “But… What for?”
The Wife: “My parents are coming over for dinner. We need the house to be spic and span”
Me: “Don’t worry, they’re never going to look up. It doesn’t matter how dirty the ceiling fan is”
The Wife: “Please… That’s not true”
Me: “Nobody looks at the ceiling. Unless you make them choke on the food. Hehehehe”
The Wife: <She gives me The Look™>
Me: “Err… OK, quick, without looking up. What color is the ceiling?”
The Wife: “Hmm…. White?”

Truthfully, I’ve never noticed the color of the walls, let alone of the ceiling. But wait… She’s staring straight at me as well. She doesn’t know the color of the ceiling either. I’m scared to look up, because I don’t want to be the idiot that doesn’t know what color our house is. But neither does she. Oh dear, this has turned into a staring contest. We’re looking straight at each other. She’s not even blinking! Oh my God! She’s going to look up at the ceiling as soon as I blink. I can’t let her have that. I continue to stare harder.

She’s now giving me the “I’ll-kill-you-if-you’re-wrong look”.
I counter with a “There’s-still-a-small-possibility-I-might-be-right look”.
She turns it into a “You’re-going-to-pay-for-this-dearly look”
I meekly offer a “Maybe-we-can-come-to-some-sort-of-agreement-? look”

The contest comes to a premature end with my intellectual surrender, and we both look up at the ceiling. Damn it. It’s white.

The Wife: “Right. Get up on that chair and clean the fan”

Sun Tzu, the author of the great treatise on marital arguments called “The Art of War”, offers some helpful advice in this scenario: “When cornered by the Tiger, act like a Penguin.” I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I think it means you slime away like a penguin when asked to do any work. Therefore, it’s time to go into backup plan.

Me: “Why don’t we just turn on the fan? That way, no one can see the dirt.”
The Wife: “What?”
Me: “See… When the fan is rotating, you can’t really see the dirt on it – It’s all blurred!”
The Wife: “That’s not the solution”
Me: “But its ONE solution. One that works too”
The Wife: “But the dirt will still be there…”
Me: “…and no one will be able to see it. Problem solved, right?”
The Wife: “Yes, but the dirt will still be there.”
Me: “Don’t worry, it’ll be our little secret. Literally our Dirty Little Secret. Wink-Wink. Hahaha…”

Oh dear. There’s that look again. That tingling feeling of impending doom crosses me. But this is not the time to give into tingliness. Sun Tzu and I are going to fight this out, fight it out to the end. The damn ceiling fan is not going to outwit me. I mean, what does it say about me if I let a stupid fan – all it does all day is go round-and-round – defeat me. Surrender is not an option.

I am going to win this one.

[Update - Part 2 is here]

Anyway, I was talking with a friend about this problem, who shall be called only Diri, and at the end of a rather productive brainstorm session around how to reduce the pain-points of the marriage ceremony, we came up with the WRAP methodology. Wedding Reception Annoyance Prevention.

You’ll remember that I’d earlier proposed a new protocol for conducting marriages. A simpler, more efficient and straightforward process that benefits all parties involved. It was called Marriage 2.0. Despite its brilliance, I notice that it didn’t catch on as widely as I’d hoped. This is a new and refined version of the original proposal.

Photos and Fake Smiles

The first observation is that most people that go to a wedding tend to feel obligated to get a photo clicked with the bride and groom. It’s almost like a payment for the free food that they’re about to eat. This tradition has no benefits at all. Here’s what we propose instead:  We’ll place cardboard cut-outs of the bride and groom all over the marriage hall. People can come in, stand next to the cutouts and get their pics clicked. The advantages of this approach are obvious: You can have several cutouts, placed strategically next to the food counters, so that the photo-taking process is highly parallelized, increasing throughput of the guests. Improved guest flow dynamics will result in better resource utilization.

Choice of Food

Previously, we had proposed that people go to any restaurant of their choice and order whatever they like, and finally send the receipts to the groom for reimbursement. Apparently, this is not a good idea, because one of the reasons people like to go to weddings is to meet other friends that they never otherwise see.

Fine.

So our slightly-modified proposal is to have everyone call their favorite Pizza/Restaurant place and get them to deliver their favorite food to the marriage hall. This way when you arrive at the marriage hall, your Pizza will be waiting for you. You can then take the Pizza to the cut-outs to get your pics clicked with the food you’re eating, so the bride and groom can later see what you ate. I assume this is an important feature – seeing what guests are eating – because at most weddings, the photo-and-video people keep following guests to the dining hall, clicking pics just when the food is about to enter my mouth. The other advantage of this process is now the reimbursement step is completely eliminated, since the delivery guy can go straight to the groom to get money from him.

Why leave the couple out?

You will notice that in this new and improved flow, there is no need for the bride and groom to be on stage. Instead of bring hungry and tired, they are free to go to the star attraction of the day, the food. However, appearing in the dining hall means that guests may be unable to resist the temptation to shake hands with the couple and wish them best of luck. In the worst case, this will degenerate into the couple having to shake hands with 100s of people congratulating them- The very thing we’re trying to avoid.

Therefore, our proposal is to have the bride and groom wear disguises, and mingle amongst the crowd and eat the food as it was meant to be. Apparently, Akbar, the Mughal Emperor and Shah Rukh Khan have both employed this strategy with great success. This way, the happy couple is really happy because they are well fed, instead of starved and tired at their own wedding.

The brilliance of this strategy is undeniable. This process makes the guests and the bride & groom happier. I can’t see why this shouldn’t become the default process for managing wedding receptions.

As usual, the answer comes from Shahrukh Khan. Have you seen that SRK movie – Rab Ne Bana de Jodi? It’s this epic movie where Shahrukh Khan goes undercover as a dancer. SRK and I have similar problems – We’re both trying to do shady things while protecting our legitimate careers. SRK is trying to protect his career in the electricity company, and I’m trying to protect my life against all the people that I’ve pissed off. Thinking about it, Batman, SRK and I are in the same boat here. We’re all doing this great service to humanity by risking our lives, but we need to protect ourselves from the evils of society. Batman has the Joker to worry about, SRK has the US immigration department to worry about, and I have The Wife to worry about.

Anyway, The way SRK solves the problem in the movie is totally brilliant! He – get this – stops wearing glasses and taadaaaaa! He becomes a brand new guy that no one in his regular life can recognize. Totally inspired! What brilliance!

I was going to use this same strategy, but unfortunately I don’t wear glasses. So instead, I decided to continue to write this blog under a pseudoname. Enter PowerPanda!

That’s right – I am now the PowerPanda. @powerpanda7 on Twitter. PowerPanda has all my superpowers, so you shouldn’t really see a change in what gets written here. Now, I can say whatever I want here without any fear that I might one day get a letter filled with white powder sent by some deranged character. Now, to be completely fair, my name has appeared in several blog posts here, and there’s at least one picture. But no matter. This is the internet, and as everyone knows, the internet is the safest place to lock away secrets. My secret is safe here.

So, ladies and gentlemen, the time has come to let the PowerPanda take over. Behold, The power of the panda.

Every religion needs some basic tenets, which form the foundations of the principles of the religions. Based on this, the other stuff flows, mythology of the religion, the Gods (I’m thinking Angelina Jolie will be a uber-goddess) etc.. but I have to still figure this out. I do, however, have a draft of the 5 major tenets of Adityaism.

1. Rotating Gods and Goddesses
I’m thinking it is really important to have attractive Gods and Goddesses, since they must justify being worshiped. For example, I think Angelina Jolie will make a great Goddess, because she is just so easy on the eyes. However, if the Gods and Goddesses are given permanent status, then they might slack off, do some stupid things or just stop caring about themselves (case in point: Britney Spears), and then we’ll be in this embarrassing position of having a Goddess who’s in Jail or in Rehab.

To get around this, I think Gods and Goddesses will be initially appointed for a 2-year term, and their status will be subject to review and renewal at the end of the period. This should keep everyone on their toes and ensure that we don’t have any slacker Gods or Goddesses.

2. Flexible Vegetarianism
Most religions have a strong view of food – what is acceptable and not acceptable. Jains for example, are not allowed to eat roots, Hindus beef etc… I think this is too stringent, since it limits choice, but capitalism has comprehensively proven that more choice is always better. I mean just look at how many options we have for cell phone providers.

Dietary restrictions in Adityaism will follow a similar approach. Everyone will be required to be vegetarian, except when they feel like eating non-veg food. Acceptable reasons for someone to feel like eating non-veg food include (but not limited to): “It smells good“, “My friends are eating it“, “The restaurant is close by” and “I haven’t eaten non-veg all day“.

3. Dynamic Holidays
Religious holidays are awesome (actually all kinds of holidays are awesome), but they suffer from a fatal flaw. They’re based on I-don’t-know-what-calendar, which means several of them are wasted on weekends, overlapping holidays and random distribution across the year etc… Wouldn’t it be great if there was an all-religion-holiday-rationalization summit where everyone agreed to move around religious holidays so that we could get 4 continuous weeks off during the summer? However, since the big religions are not going to do that, Adityaism will solve the problem by creating dynamic holidays.

All holidays are required to be either on Mondays or Fridays to facilitate long weekends. No two holidays can overlap, and they must be distributed throughout the year such that any 4-week period has at least 1 holiday. Plus, followers of Adityaism will be able to declare holidays on-demand as per their convenience to overlap with certain sporting events (Hint! Hint!)