Desi In Toronto

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NEW DELHI: For those suffering from aviophobia, the fear of flying, divine help will be at hand soon with a grand temple with south Indian architecture coming up just outside the airport here.

“We started constructing this temple in August last year. It will be open for public in two-three months,” said Arun Arora, spokesperson for Delhi’s airport development firm, which has been promoted by GMR, a Hyderabad-based infrastructure company.

“But the temple is not being built inside the airport. It is a part of the commercial area in the airport’s vicinity. It will be accessible to anyone,” Arora said.

Well, it’s true. Whenever I fly, I look for the nearest deity and bow my head and hope I get to where I want safely and not trust the experts like : the pilot, the engineer, the stewards, the air traffic controller, the ground staff etc.

This mindless superstition is so pathetic that it boggles my mind.

I remember the time when outright stupidity broke out in 1995/1996 when statues of the lord Ganesha started “drinking milk” around India and the world. I remember how excited all my batch mates were, in the MBA college I was attending (you heard right, MBA graduates became sniveling pathetic morons). Of course, the hysteria died down a bit once it was discovered that this “miracle” was the result of surface tension and capillary action but more so because the statues were clogged with the 1000s of liters of milk. But that did not dissuade the believers who still think stone statues drink milk.

And my friends call me stupid for not believing.

There is bone headed dumb.

I can’t stand atheists — but it’s not because they don’t believe in God. It’s because they’re crashing bores.

Read Dawkins, or Hitchens, or the works of fellow atheists Sam Harris (“The End of Faith”) and Daniel Dennett (“Breaking the Spell”), or visit an atheist website or blog (there are zillions of them, bearing such titles as “God Is for Suckers,” “God Is Imaginary” and “God Is Pretend”), and your eyes will glaze over as you peruse — again and again — the obsessively tiny range of topics around which atheists circle like water in a drain.

Then there is the smack down of the afore mentioned bone headed dumbness.

Charlotte Allen is very, very angry with us atheists — that’s the only conclusion that can be drawn from her furious broadside in The Times on May 17. She can’t stand us; we’re unpopular; we’re a problem. What, exactly, is the greatest crime of modern atheists?

We’re boring.

I can’t actually argue with that. It’s true. We’re all just ordinary people — your neighbors, your friends, your relatives. I know atheists who are accountants, real estate agents, schoolteachers, lawyers, soldiers, journalists, even ministers (but don’t tell their congregations!). Our leading lights are college professors, scientists, philosophers, theologians and other such pedantic, scholarly riffraff. For entertainment, they read books, and if they want to do something ambitious and dramatic, they write books. I’m one of them, so trust me, I know — we don’t exactly live the James Bond lifestyle. Calling us boring is a fair cop.