Nathuram Godse

A Bollywood extra flew to Hollywood to dramatise the only notable day in Nathuram's life, the one where he greeted the world's foremost pacifist with a shower of lead.

Nathuram Godse was a Pakistani freedom fighter whose legacy survives to this day. If the reader had snuffed out Mohandas Gandhi, perhaps the reader would have a legacy too. Indians, mainly of the right wing, consider him their hero. His face serves as the logo of both the BJP and the RSS.

Early years

Nathuram was born on 19 March 1910 to a poor Hindu family. This was Mr. and Mrs. Goatse, although you know what always happens when government clerks try to get names right on official credentials. The couple had already had three sons and a daughter, each boy dying in infancy. Convinced that there was a curse that was dooming all their male offspring, they reared their new baby boy as a girl, making him wear a dress skirt, lacy panties, a push-up bra, and other girlie accesories, and eventually entering him into "talent competitions." This treatment earned him the nickname "Nathuram" — literally, "Ram with a nose-ring." After his younger brother was born, they started treating him as a boy again. But it was too late: the nickname stuck.

Fight for freedom

The real Nathuram experiences 'afterglow' after his successful assassination.

As he matured, Nathuram saw many injustices in India. He saw the oppression of the masses, food shortages, and the dawning of Internet porn. Eventually, Gandhi began to gain favor and advocate measures to equalise Indian society. Nathuram was all for this, until he considered the consequences for Internet porn.

Soon he knew that the force causing this upheaval had to be eradicated. And that, to eradicate it, he would have to pay the ultimate price. At the time, the ultimate price was Rs44,000, and Nathuram didn't have that kind of pocket change. So he instead slayed Hindu supremacy's greatest enemy, that anorexic busybody Gandhi. On 31 January 1948, Nathuram fired the bullets that would transform the world — or, rather, un-transform it — back to continued, titillating exploitation.

Why I Killed Gandhi

Nathuram's book, on killing a pacifist, is regarded as the first major work of the Indian irony movement.

Nathuram wrote a book on why he killed Gandhi. Unfortunately it was, and still is, banned by the Indian government, despite being a much finer piece of literature than the Nobel-prize-winning crap of another notorious supremacist, the overrated Mein Kampf.

Nathuram's book made the following points about the object of his murder:

• He acceded to India breaking off a small piece of Western India (and a smaller piece on the other end) and giving it to the Muslims.
• He wanted India also to give Pakistan 5.5 billion Rupees by way of "war reparations."
• He was, in the eyes of some, a sex symbol. Totally apart from the fact that Nathuram was raised as a girl, Gandhi to him was merely a dirty womaniser who was corrupting the morals of the youth.

Nathuram in popular culture

The character of Nathuram has a cameo appearance both at the start (a flashback) and the end of the movie Gandhi, playing alongside Ben Kingsley and a toy handgun. The actor who played Nathuram is not nearly as famous as either of these co-stars. This movie frequently runs in Pakistan (before the main feature, instead of Looney Tunes) because Pakistanis can leave the cinema in satisfaction after two minutes and not have to stick around to see how it all works out.