I was all ready to fill up a form on Saturday and declared my intentions of doing so to my family. Pat came the reply, "Tomorrow is amaavas. Wait till Monday!" "What? Why?" I asked. "Amaavas would be in the evening, right? I would fill up in the morning!" I said as if having made a valid point. "No!" Again came the reply. "The amaavas is from tonight to tomorrow night." What! I couldn't even believe it. If amaavas is related to the moon, how on earth can there be an amaavas during the day? (Ignore my ignorance in this regard). My point being, there is no way you can see the moon during the day (unless you travel by a rocket which would take you the other part of the world where there is still night while the day moves on in your part of the world). So, every day becomes an amaavas.
Anyway, is amaavas so bad that you shouldn't fill up a damn form? What effect would the visibility or the non-visibility of the moon (in this case) have on a simple form that I want to fill up? It is also said that one should avoid travelling during amaavas. Why? Are there any concrete explanations? No common man has an answer to this. And those who claim to know the answers, well guys I don't believe you people. My simple point is, should we stop living every fortnight when there is amaavas? If I am not allowed to fill up a form (for reasons unspecified) or travel fearing an accident coz of this amaavas, then we should not be allowed to do anything on that day. Every amaavas should be declared as a national holiday or even an international holiday if there are people around the world who believe in this concept.
There are crores of people doing several things on an amaavas. Does everything go wrong for everybody? Why can't we treat an amaavas as any other day? Why put these restrictions on people just because you cannot see the moon on a certain day that too when there is a simple scientific explanation to this phenomemon? Give me a proper explanation as to why I shouldn't do a certain thing on a certain day and I am ready to accept you. Don't force things on me just because you were told not to do something on a certain day by your parents which in turn was told to them by their parents and so on.
Anyway, just because I didn't want to argue with them, for the simple fact that they would never understand, I would postpone my work till Monday. But these are certain things I certainly wouldn't even mention to my future generation.
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1 comment:
Adi, it is really good to see you blogging again.
Nice post.
The strange thing about these false beliefs is that they don't seem to be false. The superstitious person always wants to say in these matters, "Who knows?" or "We can never know for sure" in which case the appropriate responses are respectively, "I know :P" or "Yes, we never can. Everything is a matter of probabilities. But that does not mean everything is equally uncertain. There are some things that are damn close to certainty and others damn close to impossibility. The former we call in our daily language as "true" (although we are technically incorrect) and the latter as "false". Evidence is the means to test any theory. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence."
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