Gwyneth Paltrow vs Hinduism

Several days ago, news came that celebrity sleazeball Lindsay Lohan is being sued by a scientist who claims she ripped off her formula for a tanning spray. Things aren't so peachy up the other end of the celebrity spectrum, either. Gwyneth Paltrow has pissed off the Hindus. Or rather, she has received strong criticism from a USA-based Hindu leader, Rajan Zed, for co-opting the religion in the name of promoting shoes and handbags on the blog Gwenny runs for the website Goop.

Rather than writing about "mundane topics like 'Boots by Gucci', 'Banana Pancakes', 'The Hungry Cat' and 'Tweezerman' - in which she talks about taming the unruly eyebrows of men", Rajan Zed suggests that Gwenny might use her column to address matters of a more spiritual nature, such as "like realising self, immortality, deeper reality, eternity, soul, inner realms of the mind and spirit". Kinda like these here Hindu holy men. They don't care about taming their unruly eyebrows. They don't even got pants on. But the problem with Rajan's criticism is this. What will happen when Gwenny looks into her inner realm ... and realises that there is nothing there?

I had a mate who pissed off some Hindus once, too. It wasn't because of a celebrity shopping and lifestyle blog, though. He just wanted to get around the irritating rules and regulations accompanying unemployment benefits in Australia. See, rule is that if you're on the dole, you have to apply for a certain number of appropriate jobs per week and if you get that job, you gotta take it unless you have a stunningly good reason. My way around this was to apply for jobs I could not possibly get - like senior, six-figure posts in the public service - and apply for jobs I could get in a manner that ensured I would not get them - like sending an academic CV outlining my publications and teaching experience to a job at a call centre. But this mate of mine had a more creative approach...

He pretended to be a Hindu, of the untouchable caste.

Accordingly, he insisted that the only sorts of jobs that would be appropriate for him to apply for would be jobs like building funeral pyres, skinning animals to make leather or cleaning roadside latrines. All occupations in conveniently low demand in urban Australia. In a classic Scooby Doo ending, "it would have worked, too" if he wasn't an agnostic white guy called Jeremy and his case worker wasn't a Hindu woman called Kavindra.