The Golden Child of Nepal

The little girl in the photo above is a living Goddess in Nepal. She is three years old and will live in some temple, pretty much in isolation until she reaches puberty and loses her Deity status. She will be worshipped by Hindus and Buddhists as an incarnation of the powerful Hindu deity Taleju. So how do you go from being a normal three year old to Goddess? A panel of judges conducted a series of ancient ceremonies to select the goddess from several 2- to 4-year-old girls . They check for physical imperfections, hair , teeth, skin, and they can't be afraid of the dark. As a final test, the living goddess must spend a night alone in a room among the heads of ritually slaughtered goats and buffaloes without showing fear. Yikes, scares me just reading about it.

This story begs a number of questions, and ill informed opinions, and that's where I come in, I specialize in idiotic questions and ill informed baseless opinions, it's what I do. So for your edification and enlightenment, here we go.

First of all there is the whole child celebrity thing. Here in America we enjoy nothing more than watching child stars grow in to less appealing adults. Dating back to the little rascals, child stars have taken three paths. A tiny minority go on to become adult actors, the majority tend to take jobs behind the cameras or go on to do some other type of work, and another group, the ones we take such joy in, self destruct. Gary Coleman, Lindsay Lohan, Danny Bon-a-Douchie, ahhhh thanks for the memories. So will this little baby Deity grow in to a Nepalese wild child. Is there a DUI, operating a Yak under the influence, charge in her future? One can only hope. You have to admit that going from Goddess to nobody at the first sprout of hair on the Who Haa is a pretty hard fall for a kid to take.

This kid has the potential of being the Hootie and The Blowfish of southern Asia. Sure we all sang along to "Only wanna be with you", now name the follow up album , name one song on the follow up. Exactly, most of us cant do it. And whats really going on in that temple? Will she be educated, taught responsible behavior, or will she come out of there dumb as a rock and spoiled rotten. A Nepalese Paris Hilton in the making?

The father of the Golden Child said he was both proud and saddened, but whats really going on. Will he remain humbled by the great honor, or will he do a Billy Ray Cyrus and get fat from pimping the cash cow that is his daughters celebrity. Will dad quit his Sherpa gig, maybe get his own show? Only time will tell.

And lets not forget that this little tyke was locked in a room alone with goat and buffalo heads. The trauma from that one night may cause her to join some wacky Nepal version of Scientology.

I kid, but the reality is, that the girls who are made living Deity's go on to not so bright futures. Little wonder that a group of people who believe good skin and teeth qualify one for God status, also believe that anyone who marries one of these girls will die young. The end result is that most of these kids go on to live destitute lives, because nobody wants to die young.