Monkey business

It's easy to overlook the obvious.

The biggest mistake many businesses and project planners make is to forget to place a deity on the payroll.

The Dallas Cowboys certainly learned this lesson back in their heyday. They were God's team as well as America's team, and it worked (until Deion Sanders sort of overdid it).

This month a business school in India was looking for a chairman for their institution. "We scanned many big names in the field of technology and management. Ultimately, we settled for Lord Hanuman, as none was bigger than him," said Vivek Kangdi, vice chairman of The Sardar Bhagat Singh College in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh. The school awards bachelor's degrees in engineering and management.

Hanuman the monkey god is one of the most popular gods in the crowded pantheon of Hindu deities. According to the report on CNN, his most famous feat, as described in the Hindu epic the Ramayana, was leading a monkey army to fight the demon King Ravana and rescue a kidnapped princess.

This reminds me of the liner notes on the Christian music album my friends and I put together back in college. "Produced by the Holy Spirit" we wrote then. We meant it in the most humble way, rather than as total presumption. But, hey, we were young. One reviewer pointed out that the Holy Spirit must have neither taste nor skill if our album was any indication.

Let this be my public apology to God. Blasphemy pops up so easily in our thoughts, I suppose, that we come to think of it as piety.


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