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Posted on: May 20th, 2009It was a Sunday lunch invitation from one of my office colleagues as he had become a father of a baby boy a month ago. So I went there, with a feeling that I am going to get bored as I won’t know anyone there. But met another colleague and felt a little relieved. As soon as I reached there, I knew it was going to be a tough time as I had to participate in the ongoing Pooja as well which was being done for the welfare of the newborn.
While it totally went tangentially off my brain as to how a Pooja can ensure the well being of the newborn for whom, for the first year, every day is a new day, I think it went off tangentially my friend and his wife as well but due to elder’s present in home they were probably doing it is what I could read from the ambiance there.
My friend has done a masters in IT and his wife is a masters in arts and so seeing them believing in this made me wonder, how much can education do to salvage the intellectual rampage done by blind faith, superstition and intellectual black holes created by vested interests who intend to rule the society and people’s lives.
Normally I can envisage a scenario wherein the educated lot may have protested against such practices but the orthodox lot must have suppressed it saying that just because they had got the children educated does not mean the children have outsmarted them and can have a say in everything. Or may be worse, may be these people got degrees but forgot to get educated and so even being the so called white-collared educated intellectuals believe in these rituals which have near zero relevance in today’s age.
As these thoughts transcended the horizon of the gray matter of my brain, the Pooja proceedings continued. The Pundit was blabbering some mantras, best deciphered to him (I can only guess so), my friend pretending to understand them to the extent of decoding them and throwing flowers at the deity setup at the instructions of the Pundit. I was watching all this; meanwhile my other colleague took me out for some time as aunty requested us to get some tomatoes for salad. So we two went, and got them from the nearby market.
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