SATIRE ALERT: Develop New Albany announces immediate need for turbans, flutes and rubber snakes -- and maybe a tomahawk, just to be safe.

This is NOT India.

It may not be as obvious as sombreros, maracas and the Frito Bandito's Suburbanite Fight Song ...

But this IS Develop New Albany.

 ... so I'll diagram today's satire, starting here with DNA's forthcoming networking gig at a new business which will learn the truth soon enough.

The Kula Center is hosting the event, and it looks like the Kula Center is going to be an awesome place (and this is no satire).

The Kula Center is your destination for health and wellness in Southern Indiana. Located in downtown New Albany, services currently include yoga instruction, massage, health coaching, cupping, and meditation.

Kula means community of the heart in the Sanskrit language, and that is what you will find at The Kula. Integrated into a historic neighborhood, with grounds that include century old trees, a visit to The Kula Center will lift your spirits and provide new insights into how to live your best life.

In retrospect, I wish the Kula Center hadn't mentioned those century-old trees; somewhere, Jeff Gahan's sawdust-flecked ears are twitching, and he'll be down at the Street Department lubing the Husqvarna before dusk falls.

The point is Sanskrit.

Sanskrit is the classical language of Indian and the liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It is also one of the 22 official languages of India. The name Sanskrit means "refined", "consecrated" and "sanctified". It has always been regarded as the 'high' language and used mainly for religious and scientific discourse.

Experience hath shown that DNA won't be able to resist the temptation to "reach out" for a low cultural denominator to appropriate, and what could be more stereotypically inappropriate than snake charmers?

Because ... as with those as yet unaddressed sombreros, maracas and delighted Frito Bandito squeals ... snake charming is a delicate topic.

But, let's learn more.

BBC investigates India's snake charmers and gets told that all the snakes left in 1947

The channel raised a storm on social media after asking whether India should erase its snake charming culture to embrace modernity.

See?

This is how we construct satire with a positive and educational message, even if DNA refuses to acknowledge this or any of my recent messages.

India's wonderful, Kula's cool, and we're never going to forget DNA's Taco Walk transgressions for so long as the taxpayer-supported organization refuses to address them publicly.

C'mon, DNA: The time has come. A fact's a fact. Taco Walk belongs to her. Why not give it back?

DNA's and the newspaper's masks ... or, thoughts occasioned by an excellent essay called "Meet the man who hides behind a mask."

Come to think of it, I may have over-thought this satire. If Sanskrit is an official language of India, and if Indians live in India, then we should expect to see this sort of misplaced Indian stereotype.

SMH. Anyone have numbers on DNA's municipal funding level?

THE BEER BEAT: Sometimes compliance takes a labyrinth.

Attention, oppressed Indian(a) ATC permit holders.

Why This Bar Built a Labyrinth Outside Its Front Door, by Cara Giaimo (Atlas Obscura)

The bar is now, technically, over 500 meters from the street.

... The employees of Aiswarya Bar—located 150 meters from Highway 17, in Kerala—saw a third option. A few days before the law went into effect, they began building a small maze out of prefabricated concrete walls, leading from the building’s entrance to the street. When they finished, the distance from barstool to road had stretched three times its original length.

"Affective Labor as the Lifeblood of a Commons," though not at the next 5 o'clock network.

Funny how topics like affective labor never make it to one of those One Southern Indiana daisy-chain mixers at Kye's, with Bud Light, Papa John's and lots of desperate slobbering. It's a really good read, but does the Southern Indiana business community read?

Affective Labor as the Lifeblood of a Commons, by David Blooier

We have so internalized the logic of neoliberal economics and modernity, even those of us who would like to think otherwise, that we don’t really appreciate how deeply our minds have been colonized. It is easy to see homo economicus as silly. Certainly we are not selfish, utility-maximizing rationalists, not us! And yet, the proper role of our emotions and affect in imagining a new order remains a murky topic.

That’s why I was excited to run across a fascinating paper by Neera M. Singh, an academic who studies forestry at the University of Toronto. Her paper, “The Affective Labor of Growing Forests and the Becoming of Environmental Subjects” focuses on “rethinking environmentality” in the Odisha region of India.

Khushwant Singh, and some time off.

It is exceedingly rare for me to take time off from work and then stay at or near home, rather than get out of town as quickly as my legs and finances will carry me, but between now and Easter, that's exactly what I'll be doing.

The intent is neither rest nor recreation, but making time for tackling numerous bureaucratic and organizational tasks (no, my taxes are finished, thank you very much) by putting one 800-lb stress gorilla (work) on hold while vanquishing another, which might loosely be characterized as home and family projects. At least, this is the fond hope. Two good weeks, and maybe I can whip it.

Whip it good, in fact.

Readers, wish me luck. Organizational skills are not a personal strong suit, so it will require sheer force of repetition (as usual) to get ducks in a row, cats herded, and whatever other anthropomorphic references I'm forgetting.

I'm not sure how much time there'll be during the next two weeks for blogging and my customary poison pen rabblerousing. Dire warnings of content reduction have been issued previously, to no effect. I'll probably make time, anyway. Finding the chance to write is perhaps the one bit of time management I do quite well, to the annoyance of many.

For your edification this Monday morning, consider this obituary in The Economist. Before reading it in the print edition, I'd never heard of Khushwant Singh. Now I wish I'd have met him.

Khushwant Singh: India’s gadfly

Khushwant Singh, India’s pre-eminent gadfly, died on March 20th, aged 99

 ... His Hindustan Times column, widely syndicated, was eventually called “With Malice Towards One and All”. Singly and collectively he shot them down: the power-crazed politicians, the Hindutva fanatics, the “barbaric” mullahs of Pakistan, empty-headed Bollywood stars, commercialised cricket, modern cricket fans with their bugles and firecrackers, and the bare-bottomed defecators who lined city avenues in the mornings. Poetry and jokes leavened the invective. If he ran out of “loud-mouthed, sweaty, smelly” Indians to pillory there was the country itself, impossible India, like an overcrowded room or a swarming dung-heap—though, affectionately, “my dung-heap”.