The Dashboard

Download or read book Ganesha on the Dashboard written by V Raghunathan and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Take the way we go about buying a new car. We identify an auspicious date and time, then proceed to break a coconut, plonk a plastic deity of Ganesha on the dashboard, and zoom off at great speed, refusing to wear our seatbelts. Supposedly educated, smart and tech-savvy, Indians can be surprisingly unscientific in their daily lives. Think of the crores spent every year remodelling homes according to vaastu, in the hope of changing luck; and the continued horrors of female infanticide, because it is only the son who can help the father’s journey to heaven... This unsparingly critical, scathingly analytical book points out the shocking lack of scientific temper among the vast majority of Indians, and how this holds us up as a nation in the twenty-first century.