FIRE UP THE EDSEL, POP OPEN A NEW COKE, AND BOOK THAT VACATION WITH US

This A.P. piece informs us that India, in an effort to increase tourism, is encouraging visitors to stay in rural villages and "enjoy life's simple pleasures," such as malaria, man-eating tigers, close-minded & superstitious locals, as well as charming relics of the past like throwing widows on funeral pyres and a rigid caste-system.

The plan, developed in concert with the United Nations' "Development Program," identifies 36 rustic locations that travelers can visit to create jobs, "encourage villagers to clean up their surroundings," "boost [] handmade crafts and traditional art forms," and discover for themselves just how primitive and barbaric their distant ancestors were.

Well, if the U.N.'s behind it, it must be a good idea.

Another element of the plan, exposing high school and college students from cities and towns to the lifestyles and culture of rural India, has generated a great deal of excitement.

"I'm a Brahmin," said Deeva Srinthrapinan, a 17 year-old High School student informed by her school's headmaster of the plan. "But they expect me to live in that dirty village? Do they have, like, clothing stores there?"

"I'm going to the U.S. to study at Harvard next year," Raju Chadhoury, 18, told us while sitting at a Mumbai traffic light in his 2006 Lexus. "I don't have time to clean latrines in some backwards village. My people moved to the city 400 years ago. We left that sort of thing behind. Plus, the girls in those villages are extremely dark and have bad teeth."