Undergraduate witnesses birth of a goddess

According to a newspaper article, in one small rural Indian village, people had begun worshipping a new deity who was described as the goddess of AIDS. "That was all I had, that one little article, but I just decided to go," said Anna Portnoy, a Harvard College student who was searching for a topic for an honors thesis. "Deities crop up all over the place all the time in India, but the idea of actually seeing one come into being was fascinating to me." Such deities are thought to both cause and cure the disease over which they preside. They are typically part of local village-based folk traditions and tend to merge into one another in the minds of their worshippers. Portnoy became the first Westerner to perceive the AIDS goddess.