Word: kali
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...down on the earthen floor before the shrine. In ritual order, Karmakar wafted incense over her, tore off her blue skirt and pink T shirt, shaved her, sprinkled her with holy water from the Ganges and rubbed her with cooking fat. Then chanting mantras to the "mother" goddess Kali, he sawed off Manju's hands, breasts and left foot, placing the body parts in front of a photograph of a blood-soaked Kali idol. Police say the arcs of blood on the walls suggest Manju bled to death in minutes...
...Human sacrifice has always been an anomaly in India. Even 200 years ago, when a boy was killed every day at a Kali temple in Calcutta, blood cults were at odds with a benign Hindu spiritualism that celebrates abstinence and vegetarianism. But Kali is different. A ferocious slayer of evil in Hindu mythology, the goddess is said to have an insatiable appetite for blood. With the law on killing people more strictly enforced today, ersatz substitutes now stand in for humans when sacrifice is required. Most Kali temples have settled on large pumpkins to represent a human body; other followers...
...Pakistan: Al-Qaeda Redux India: Killing for Kali...
...Carolyn's killers planned to pray to another Hindu deity that November night, the fearsome Kali, goddess of destruction. A dilapidated temple devoted to Kali lies a few hundred meters from where Carolyn was strangled, just beyond her grave, which was finally discovered by police a few weeks ago after a tip-off. There, in a lean-to fashioned from a corrugated-iron roof and four wooden posts, the only decoration a single spear stuck into the raw earth, Shanmugavela and the three other killers conducted a gruesome set of rites upon Carolyn's corpse, an otherworldly ceremony they believed...
...Even if Shanmugavela did exploit the gullibility of the outsiders, some part of him must have been in thrall to the goddess's dark power. After making the offering, police sources say, Shanmugavela fell into a trance in the makeshift Kali temple and intoned a four-digit sequence, these numbers the twisted legacy of a woman's life. Michael drove straight to a betting shop and put down a few hundred dollars, carefully repeating the sequence. The numbers were, of course, losers. Had they been the winning numbers, would the sacrifice of Carolyn's life have been any less...