Foot IN Mouth (Disease)

NO thank you” is our answer to mother nature's abundant gifts as we shoot for goals upstream -- fast and furious. We are brown, but we need to be fair. Add some icing on the cake and we can also be lovely. I can understand we can take Naomi Campbell and make her fair, but I wonder how we make this beautiful celebitchy lovely.

And so, with the mad rush to reach home for Eid, Mad Cow Owners' Disease reaches epidemic proportions. Traders have put their cows on the Fatkins Diet, turning them overnight into perishable Sumo wrestlers. As Motijheel's Dhaka Stock Exchange goes into recess and Hatirjheel's Romance Stock Exchange gears up, Gabtoli's Livestock Exchange is in full frenzy with the largest collection of beefcakes.

Ah, steroids...Works wonders.

But these quadrupeds are bovine for a reason. If they were smart, they would instead opt for the Atkins Diet (minus the steak). After all, it is only the fat ones that get slaughtered.

As for us bipeds, we now add meat to the no-eat list already consisting of fruit, vegetables and fish.

It's not all bad news though. You can actually tell whether a cow is on steroids -- it reacts slowly to a poke (opposite reaction in the human -- reacts so fast that that he wins the Olympic gold). But do take caution -- the really skinny one which is not so lucky as to be on the rich diet, may promptly poke you back.

Let's face it. There is no way around the fat, sluggish cow. But look at the brighter side, a steroid injected cow is a very fit (looking) cow, which, by definition, makes it a horse. There!

Holy cow! Are you telling me I am about to sacrifice a horse? We can shout ourselves hoarse on this topic, but let's not horse around the fact that we are dealing with harmful chemicals that affect even the vegetarian.

One thing is for sure, there may be some serious bovine side effects, as evidenced recently in Jackson Heights, New York. Here, we see a singular, yet a very serious case of Foot IN Mouth Disease.

The Land of the Free (taken a bit too literally) makes this gentleman forget that with rights, come responsibilities. While wearing an important cabinet hat, he ends up talking through his hat.

Not sure what his beef is with the hundreds and thousands of pilgrims as he calls the age old ritual bull-loney. There is a stampede of reactions at home and abroad. What steroid has he been injected with? An udderly honest misteak? Herdly. He sticks to his guns and remains holier than cow, er, holier than thou.

On social media, he is a laughing stock, as every little detail makes its way out of New York's Little Bangladesh.

And so, as we get ready to sacrifice cows, the Cabinet makes it own bovine sacrifice. And it is widely lauded as a precision strike, unlike the all too familiar case of a sacrificial goat. The now former minister cow-nts his blessings as he merely gets the sack. After all, with the Qurbani Eid around the corner, being bovine is life threatening.

Well, his Eid gets butchered. Wonder what new pastures he heads off to. But wherever that may be, let's keep in mind that sometimes it is better to be seen and not herd…

The writer is an engineer & CEO turned comedian (by choice), the host of NTV's The Naveed Mahbub Show and the founder of Naveed's Comedy Club.
E-mail: naveed@naveedmahbub.com