Eat Meat? Hit the Street OT This was posted to another group. Very interesting.

[Guest guest]

This is an article in today's New Bedford, MA Standard

Times...

 

Eat meat? Hit the street!

 

The Associated Press Trendy neighborhood developments

in Bombay are

increasingly shutting out non-vegetarian house-hunters

and renters.

 

BOMBAY, India — Never mind pets, smokers or loud music

at 2 a.m.

House hunters in Bombay increasingly are being asked:

" Do you eat

meat? "

If yes, the deal is off.

As this city of 16 million becomes the cosmopolitan

main nerve of a

booming Indian economy, real estate is increasingly

intersecting

with cuisine. More middle-class Indians are moving in,

more of them

are vegetarian, and the law is on their side.

" Some people are very strict. They won't sell to a

nonvegetarian

even if he offers a higher price than a vegetarian, "

said real

estate broker Norbert Pinto.

Vegetarianism is a centuries-old custom among Hindus,

Jains and

others in India. The government reckons India has some

220 million

vegetarians, more than anywhere else in the world.

" Veg or non-veg? " is heard constantly in restaurants,

at dinner

parties and on airlines. And the question has long

been an unwritten

part of the interrogation house hunters must submit

to.

But it's becoming more open, and the effects more

noticeable, all

the more so in Bombay, which attracts immigrants from

Gujarat and

Rajasthan, strongly vegetarian states, as well as

followers of the

Jain religion.

In constitutionally secular India, there's no bar to

forming a

housing society and making an apartment block

exclusively Catholic

or Muslim, Hindu or Zoroastrian.

Vegetarians say they too need segregation.

" I live in a cosmopolitan society, " said Jayantilal

Jain, trustee of

a charity group. " But vegetarians should be given the

right to admit

who they want. "

Rejected home-seekers have mounted a slew of court

challenges to the

power of housing societies to discriminate, but last

year India's

highest tribunal ruled the practice legal.

" It's just not fair. It's a monopoly by vegetarians, "

said Kiran

Talwar, 49, a prosthetics engineer who has seen

vegetarianism take

over restaurants and groceries all over his childhood

neighborhood

on posh Nepeansea Road.

" If you step out to eat, there's nothing for miles

because

everything around is veggie, " he said.

Vikramaditya Ugra, a young Bombay banker in search of

an apartment,

said vegetarian colonies were fine in neighboring

Gujarat, a state

dominated by vegetarians. " That's in tune with local

sensitivity, "

he said.

" But to impose this restriction is not right in a

cosmopolitan city

like Bombay. "

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

How interesting! I read somewhere that 90% of India's population is

still vegetarian.