You may be a Hare Krishna fanatic if ... you refuse to eat your kid's birthday cake because he blew out the candles and may have muchified the top layer with tiny kiddie spittles.

On the other hand ...

You may be a Hare Krishna fanatic if ... you'd fight with someone over who gets to swallow the leftover pit of a date, apricot or other stonefruit eaten by someone who you don't actually know but is institutionally recognized as a 'senior devotee'.

Heaps more of these here. 

 You may be a Hare Krishna fanatic if ...  you are still living off the grains you stored for y2k.   :)

 Heaps more of these here.

My wife, my neighbor Ajita and I are gradually coming up with a list of symptoms that could serve as a guide for fanatics to self-diagnose. Here's what we have so far:

You may be a Hare Krishna fanatic if ...

... you are perfectly comfortable with "That's prajapla!" as the end of a conversation.

... have ever demanded a list of ingredients when invited around for prasad at a devotee's house.

... ever gone so far as to seriously consider the legal consequences of cutting out someone's tongue for blasphemy.

... you opt to sleep on the floor next to the bed when staying at a relative's house.

... when a stranded driver asks if you can jump start her car, you reply, "No. That would be a waste of Krishna's energy."

... you cooked your own dinner at the vegetarian party Mum put on for you.

The reason I'm posting these here is so that we can collaborate. If you think of some additions to this list then please leave them as comments to this post.

The possibilities are endless and so many of us have tons of experience to draw upon. We'd like to keep them general enough not to offend anyone in particular, although we completely admit that most of what we've come up with so far have been inspired by real life events (cringe).

We called our friend Urjesvari who has the perfect sense of humor for this sort of thing. We're going to call back tomorrow and see what she comes up with, so stay tuned.

While it is normally only considered cliché that "laughter is the best medicine," specific medical theories attribute improved health, increased life expectancy, and overall improved well-being, to laughter.

A study demonstrated neuroendocrine and stress-related hormones decreased during episodes of laughter, which provides support for the claim that humour can relieve stress. In 1989, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article, wherein the author wrote that "a humor therapy program can increase the quality of life for patients with chronic problems and that laughter has an immediate symptom-relieving effect for these patients, an effect that is potentiated when laughter is induced regularly over a period".

So that's the modern science take on laughter. There is lots of evidence that laughter helps relieve stress, sharpen intellectual acumen and retention of information, and increase cardiovascular flexibility.

Although it is no substitute for chanting Hare Krishna, imagine a world without laughter.

Horrible thought isn't it?

Now watch this video and see if you can stop yourself from laughing. Good therapy.