“Please do not touch the deity.” I grew up in church, covered religion for a while and have been been in a dizzying variety of churches, temples and mosques. However, the polite request to refrain from handling god that I encountered upon entering a Hindu temple today struck me as one of the odder things I’ve come across.

My Writing and Reporting class spent the day traveling through Queens (which we’ll be covering for the rest of the semester), getting to know the ethnic makeup of the area, eating Indian food and looking for story ideas. Our assignment: find a story today, report it tomorrow and turn it in by Tuesday. [I’m doing an article on alternative medicine … anybody know anything useful?]

Anyway, as part of the trip we stopped at a Hindu temple during the festival of Ganesh-Chaturthi, the elephant-headed god. Kinda odd looking, sure, but in the words of an Indian friend: “He’s a good guy.”