We haven't changed, have we?

Over the past decade or so, India has been projected as a developing nation, with a galloping GDP and improved standards of living. Sensex and nifty are talked more than poverty and illiteracy. Bill Gates visit to India finds all big columns in the media, whereas the death of 1000 farmers gets a small corner below the ads. It goes unnoticed. There is one such thing that the media has forgotten or rather chose not to remember. They simply ignored its presence.

It was 1995. I was in my way from class V to class VI (I had written my exams, and was hoping for the positive results). During the vacation, me and my brother were visiting an uncle in Madurai, a town near the southern tip of India. I stay in a nearby town called Virudhunagar. With no more that a population of 2 lakhs then, it was no more than a bigger village. It was the time, when Dr. Manmohan Singh, the then finance minister had liberalised trade, and India came face to face with economic boom. Being a conservative town, Virudhunagar decided not to expose itself to the boom. It thought, Liberalisation and its ally modernisation will destroy India culture and Tradition. So did a thousand other villages. In such a conservative town, only one thing was booming. Superstitions in the name of Traditions.

It was a summer afternoon. The temperature was well over 42 degree Celsius. This was a normal temperature in my town. My mother had just finished cooking and has decided to have a shower. She had hung the towel on the hanger and turned to close the latch when the slippery floor played her pranks on her. She slipped and fell down. She crashed her skull on the wall and her knee to the floor. She was all alone and was helpless. Panic took her. She took a few breathes, closed her eyes and went unconscious. It was two hours before my father to arrive for lunch.

The crash wasn't too hard. She had a bit of muscles and they took the beating.She suffered a couple of minor fractures, but nothing too serious. Its been an hour and still she lay unconscious. May be her injuries were getting more serious and she started bleeding. A neighbour, an old lady, knocked our door for something and when it was not answered, she decide to act. She came in, saw my mother lying unconscious and rang my father. By the time he arrived, the lady managed to ring a few of my relatives and they had arrived too. And before my father could act, or even say something, they called for a priest, believing a ghost had taken down my mother. When my father was opposed to the idea, he was simply ignored.

The priest sat in a comfortable chair. While my unconscious mother was made to sit at his feet. He said some fucking prayers in some fucking language. He prayed God to give magic powers to Water and when God had obeyed, he sprayed it on my mother's face. She shook her body. She got conscious. My relatives felt that the priest had performed some magic and the ghost had run away. The priest gave them some magic bands to be tied on my mother's arm and some framed writings to be hung in our wall. My father stood helpless. It was a week before my father could do something. He took my mother out of town with a help of a friend and got her admitted in a hospital. her condition normalized in a couple of days. But that one week delay had left some permanent damage on m mother.

Any sane man, with the smallest common sense, would have understood what had happened. My mother fell down, got injures, panicked, had a nervous breakdown and went unconscious. She pulled some muscles, tore some ligaments and broke a couple of bones because of the fall. All she needed was rest and a few medicines. Not any fucking priest.

This happened in my family, a relatively educated one. Guess what, it has been 14 years and still those framed writings hang in our walls. If this kind of thing can happen in a educated family, think about the possibilities in a family that lives in poverty, filled with unemployed illiterates living in a village where Rocks become Gods overnight.

There are a million villages where honour killings still does happen. There are a billion people stripped of their freedom, in the name of tradition. Sati and child marriage are nowhere close to extinction. Walking on fire, burying children alive, breaking coconuts on the head, eating shit and forced marriages still does happen across the country. Ghost fears, magician worship, praying to God for child, bunking work if cat crosses are still in practice. Igniting camphor in the hand, piercing the body with 1000 nails, drinking the blood of alive birds, cutting the ear and tail of animals, raping a virgin for rain, and a lot other are still happening in India. To write about all of them, I will need a separate blog.

well, what can we do? Teach. Teach the ignorant. They may not change, but their children may. It was my first physics class in class. My teacher said, "Have you seen people getting excited in a God's festival? When the frequency of the drums and music match with the natural frequency of one's body, it does happen. It is called Resonance". He taught me physics. We can teach some common sense.