Japan enjoys a well-deserved reputation for all things batpoop loco, but India is headed to the top of the crazy chart with a bullet. Between bulldozing the Slumdog kid’s shanty like the villain in a Brendan Fraser movie, making a movie that makes Michael Bay’s movies look like cinema verité, and my personal favorite, hiring larger, more violent monkeys to control the population of smaller monkeys, India is easily my favorite story setting of the year. More to the point, today in wacky news stories, the popularity of Harry Potter (note: NOT Hari Puttar) has spawned an owl-trapping trend.

Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has blamed fans of Harry Potter for the demise of wild owls in the country as children seek to emulate the boy wizard by taking the birds as pets.
The hit books and films, which are popular in India, feature a snowy owl called Hedwig who is a feathered sidekick for the Potter character and used to deliver mail.
“Following Harry Potter, there seems to be a strange fascination even among the urban middle classes for presenting their children with owls,” Ramesh said Wednesday, according to comments reported by the BBC.
Researchers found that a growing number of owls were being trapped, traded or killed in black magic rituals. [AFP via AV Club]

My favorite part of the story is the way the modern effortlessly co-exists with the ancient, almost as an afterthought.  “A western book about a boy magician has spawned a trend of pet owls among the urban middle class.  Oh, and some actual sorcerers have also joined in, hoping to use the owl parts for black magic.”

Sidenote: This Indian guy would make Harry Potter his bitch. God knows what he had to do to make that sloth bear so happy.

The thing about photojournalism is that you can tell something bad has happened when you see a picture of a child’s toy covered in rubble.  In fact, I think Toys Covered in Rubble is a freshman seminar at J-School. Anyway, the catastrophe in question was the demolition of Slumdog Millionaire star Rubina Ali’s home. You may recall the same thing happened to her co-star less than a week ago.

Dozens of police with bamboo batons walked around the alley where Rubina Ali’s house is located and supervised demolition crews of young men wielding sledgehammers and metal rods who tore down the shanty homes, a week after bulldozers demolished the home of Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, another child star of the same film, in a similar cleanup drive in a different part of the same slum. [via this delightful slideshow]

I figured that a few months ago, when the Indian government and the filmmakers both said they were going to buy the kids new houses, that they were probably full of sh*t.  Empty promises are kind of what they do. Fine. But you’d think someone over there might whisper, “Psst: Hey. It’s gonna look really bad if we knock this bitch’s house down and make her mom breastfeed in the street.”  But no.  Progress waits for no one!  Way to go, India!  Now people can finally enjoy the majesty of that sh*t-covered alley without those ugly shanties all over it.