Eating Human Brain, Drinking From a Skull and Having Poop Thrown at You is All in a Day's Work for a CNN Reporter
DM – CNN presenter Reza Aslan has been heavily criticized after he ate part of a human brain while filming with a Hindu cannibal sect in India.
The episode, part of a series called Believer with Reza Aslan, was shown on Sunday and provoked horror and dismay from many viewers and an angry backlash by Hindus in America. …
Aslan, 44, met the Aghori in the holy Hindu city of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, where they smeared the ashes from cremated human bodies on his face.
He then drank an alcoholic drink from a human skull, before eating what he was told was human brain.
At one point he fell out with the Aghori guru who shouted: ‘I will cut your head off if you keep talking so much.’ The guru began eating his own faeces and then hurled it at Aslan.
Aslan quipped: ‘I feel like this may have been a mistake.’
Indian-Americans have criticized CNN for highlights the beliefs of a tiny cult – which has less than 100 members – which has little to do with mainstream Hinduism.
I’m not going to sit here and criticize Reza Aslan. On the contrary. I’m here to praise him for his dedication to the craft. When your bosses send you around the world to report some weird little group of primitives out of Game of Thrones, my man Reza is all in. No half measures for this guy. When the Aghori offer you human brains, you’re not gonna not eat it. If they’re eating their own shit, you eat their shit. It’s just good manners. You’re a guest in their village. And if you have any respect for diversity and multiculturalism, you do what they do. I would no sooner refuse to drink booze out of a human skull in Uttar Pradesh than I would’ve declined the Yarmulke I was offered at Portnoy’s wedding. When in Varanasi, do as the Varanasi do, I always say.
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Nor am I judging the Aghori, since I also belong to a sect that eats flesh and drinks blood. Granted, they come in wafer and wine form. And the sect has a billion members around the world. But I respect other cultures. So it’s not my place to tell gurus not to make cups out of skulls, eat their own shit or throw it at people if that’s what their god(s) tell them to do.