One Bride for Three brothers

One Bride for Three brothers

Three brothers married Ms. Dasi, who bore five children.

The logistics of sharing one wife among several men are daunting. All the children, regardless of who their biological father is, call the eldest brother pitaji, or father, while the younger brothers are all called chacha, or uncle.

“Each child knows who his father is, but you call your eldest uncle father,” said Neelchand Bhagsen, Sukh Dayal Bhagsen’s 40-year-old son.

The wife decides the delicate question of who is the father of a child, and her word in this matter is law.

NYT July 18, 2010

• from a NYT article on Pakistan:
  

Politicians have shown remarkable chutzpah in rejecting the charges of dishonesty over meeting a parliamentary requirement of a bachelor’s degree.

“A degree is a degree,” said Nawab Aslam Raisani, the chief minister of Baluchistan Province and an ally of President Asif Ali Zardari. “Whether fake or genuine, it’s a degree. It makes no difference.”

...

Even the federal minister of education, Sardar Aseff Ahmed Ali, played down the seriousness of falsified degrees, saying that “public representatives should not be sent back home merely on the basis of this small mistake.”