Category: religion

Cults and organized religion

On the way back from Mysore last week, my mom asked to go to an orphanage in Srirangapatnam which is run by one Mr Halagappa, a follower of the Sathya Sai Baba of Puttaparthi (ok I must mention that followers of the Sai Baba get pissed off if you call them followers – they claim to be “devotees”. In other words, they consider the Baba to be God. I had a long argument with my aunt once about this). It’s a nice place, located on north bank of the south stream of the Cauvery river.

We were led to the prayer hall where a little girl from the orphanage gave us prasad – something that seemed like sweetened honey and vibhuti. The atmosphere in the hall reminded me of the meditation hall in my school (Sri Aurobindo Memorial, Bangalore). There was an “om” record playing perennially. At one end, there were several photos of the Baba. The interesting thing was that surrounding the “altar”, there were symbols of various religions – om, crescent and star, fire, the cross, the star of david, etc. Maybe it indicated that the Sai Baba was all those gods combined in one.

Now, the thing with people belonging to the Sai Baba cult believe that he is God. They believe that he is God and his previous incarnation was the Sai Baba of Shirdi. Interestingly, most of his followers are also deeply religious with respect to another organized religion. For example, my mother is an extremely devout Hindu – to the extent that she believes that miracles can be caused by doing certain rituals, etc. And she is also completely into the Sai Baba cult.

Then, no organized religion has room for godmen. They do have room for religious leaders – who are supposed to interpret the teachings of the religion and explain them to the mango person, but they certainly don’t approve of religious leaders who claim to be God themselves. In fact, when a religious/spiritual leader proclaims himself to be God, he is implicitly stating that he is alone the true God and all other religions need to be rejected. Yet, he seems to get zillions of followers who are more often than not major followers of some other organized religion. Isn’t there a contradiction?

Spiritual leaders come in two forms – godmen and gurus. The former make their followers believe that they are God. The latter don’t make any such claims – they just claim to be carrying the word of some god of one or more organized religions and passing them on to the mango person. I wonder what it is that makes deeply religous people (wrt organized religion) go after godmen and become “devotees”. Don’t they see it as being contradictory to their belief in their own organized religion? Again – some of them might just be accepting these godmen as gurus and not as godmen, and that makes some sense. But what about the rest?

I know I can confront my mother directly about this, but I also know that she won’t like the idea that I’m asking her uncomfortable questions and she’ll just end up getting angry with me.

On Religion

Last Thursday there  was a function at home, of the religious type. An aunt and an uncle had come home and sang a large number of hymns. I was told that the hymns were part of a series, called the narayaneeyam, and all in praise of Lord Krishna. There were a few activities also planned along with the chanting of hymns, and occasionally people in the audience (a few other relatives) were asked to do a “namaskaara” to the deity. I mostly put ‘well left’ to these additional stuff, and watched the proceedings dispassionately, sunk into my bean bag with my laptop on my lap.

One of the guests at that function was a two-year old cousin, and he seemed to be full of enthu. He is of the religious sorts – his mom is hyper-religious, I’m told. And he did all the namaskaaras and other activities with full enthu. Later on, my mother was to admonish me saying how even the two year old would respect religion, while I just looked on. She complained about how I’ve been spoilt, and fallen under the wrong influences. I muttered something about the cousin being too innocent to know what was going on around him because of which he sincerely obeyed.

When I read Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion about six months back, I didn’t feel anything special. I’m told that the book has a lasting impact on its readers – one way or another – and that a lot of people consider it to be life-changing. I felt nothing of the sort. I just read it from start to finish, agreeing with most of its contents, and using some of its sub-plots to enhance the Studs and Fighters Theory. The only ‘impact’ it had on me was about not being a quiet atheist, and to get into arguments about existence of god, etc.

I have an interesting background in these matters. My mother and her immediate family are all ultra-religious, and I happened to grow up mostly in my maternal grandfather’s place (since both parents worked). My late father, on the other hand, was a rationalist, though he stopped short of calling himself an atheist and would passively approve of my mom’s various religious indulgences. He would quietly drive my mother and my family to the Sai Baba ashram in Whitefield, and then wait patiently outside while the rest of the people went in for their “darshan”. I would usually go in and make noises about exposing the Baba.

I don’t know how, but till recently (when I read Dawkins’s book), I would never realize when people were talking about religious stuff. For example, whenever my mom said “it’s due to god’s grace that you escaped the accident unhurt”, I’d just think that she was being rhetorical. At least, that (and swearing) are the only cases in which I take god’s name. It’s only recently, and after reading Dawkins’s book, that I realize that my mother wasn’t being rhetorical after all, and that she actually believes that it was the strength of her daily prayers that ensured I escaped those accidents unhurt.

It is also intersting to note the selection bias. My mother, and her ultra-religious sisters, and their ultra-religious relatives, selectively pick on favourable events and attribute them to god’s grace. Earlier, before reading Dawkins’s book, I would shut up, but now I’m a bit more vocal about these things, and ask them why their prayers didn’t prevent the unfavourable events from occurring. Then, they start looking for the silver lining in the cloud and attribute that to their prayers. Never mind the cloud.

So what about my religion? Some people find it contradictory that my political views are right-leaning (socially) even though I don’t believe in God. I say that I’m ‘culturally hindu’, and that Hinduism/Hindutva is not a religion but a way of life. And if you scrap away all the rituals and other beliefs, what remains in hinduism is the religion that I follow. I like to describe myself as “athiest but culturally hindu”.

I believe that poojas are just an excuse to throw feasts. I believe in rituals such as marriage ceremonies as no-questions-asked-processes which “have to be done” but I don’t believe that they are a necessary condition for any benefit, or against something bad.

Two years back, when my father died, I found the post-death ceremonies quite depressing and decided I’m not going to do them. So an uncle came up to me and asked me why I didn’t want to do the rituals. I told him I didn’t believe in them. He replied saying there was no question of belief but it was my duty to do the rituals. I told him that I didn’t believe that it was my duty to do them.

Problem with defeating elders in logical arguments is that they tend to take it personally, and then decide to attack you rather than attacking your argument. I finally ended up doing all those rituals. But I happened to fight with the shastris during each and every ceremony.

In hindsight, I realized that my fighting with the shastris, though ugly, had managed to send a “don’t mess with me” message to my relatives.

The Mata Temple in Amritsar

It seems to be a slightly obscure temple. I don’t think it is on the map of most tourists who visit Amritsar. Or maybe with the increasing breed of auto drivers turned tour guides, it is now. The Lonely Planet Guide to India calls it the “Mata temple”. Locals call it the “vaishno devi temple”. The Lonely Planet guide says it is a must-visit for women who want to get pregnant. Anyway, we went. On the way back from our trip to the Wagah border.

It is an interesting temple, to say the least. The ground floor seems to be a normal temple, but the presiding deity is an old bespectacled woman in a sari which made me think that it is dedicated to some cult. Apparently not, and this is the way that Vaishno Devi is represented in most places (that is what my mother tells me). The ground floor is again noisy as most north indian temples are. As I enter, I notice this staircase that says “vaishno devi cave” or some such thing. And I go upstairs.

The first floor of the temple has been designed with The Crystal Maze (remember that awesome TV show on Star Plus?) in mind. I don’t know if it was designed that way to attract children, or if they actually decided to model the place after some famous temples, or if they just made it that way to make the place more interesting.

So in order to reach the shrine of the main deity (again a Devi), you need to go through a large number of “tasks”. You need to climb up and down a total of three flights of stairs each way (I think I counted it right). And then there is a stretch where the ceiling is so low that you need to crawl on all fours to get past. And you need to get past a blabbering madman (an employee of the temple) in order to stand in a queue – which leads into a second cave.

This second cave has ankle-deep water, and you need to wade through that. i was wearing cargo pants whose legs could be detached at the knees, but then I was afraid of misplacing them so just rolled them up. And while you were wading through the water, you had people who started shouting slogans in favour of the Mata. Death only it was. But at the end of the passage where you waded through the water, there was a wonderful sight. A one of a kind.

There was a statue of udders of a cow, and placed directly below that was a statue of a snake, and a lingam. Interpret this ensemble in whatever way you like. I first told my mother that this was a good way of ensuring middleman-less ksheeraabhishekam. Anyways we noticed people in front of us touching the udders and the lingam and the snake (yes, unlike most temple deities, these things were available for touching for general public).

When my turn came, not knowing how to handle it, I ended up groping the udders. And then stroked the lingam below. It’s been a week since we visited that temple, but my mother is yet to stop ragging me about what I did there.

That turned out to be the last of the “adventures” as we soon came to the main deity. The pujaris there gave us kadlepuri (puffed rice) as prasad, and put some saffron marks on our foreheads (eccentrically). And we were soon back downstairs enduring the noise of the main temple.

The Sikh Museum

One of the highlights of Amritsar, which is missed by most mango tourists is the Sikh museum. It is situated on the first floor of the front wing of the Golden Temple complex (just as you enter from the main entrance) and provides fascinating insight into the history and lives of the Sikhs. The English on the labeling is bad, some pictures don’t have English labels at all (not even Hindi; only Gurmukhi stuff) and the museum is mostly made up of paintings rather than artefacts, but it is definitely a must-see.

The most fascinating thing about the history of the Sikhs as depicted in this museum is the gore. As you enter the first hall of the museum (it is basically a series of halls laid end-to-end) and turn left (actually you are supposed to turn right and see the thing anti-clockwise but the signage is so bad I turned left) you see a painting of a guy being sawed. Yes, you read that right, a guy is being sawed. Into half. Laterally. The painting shows two guys with a huge saw sawing this guy from head downwards (at the moment the painting has “captured” the guy has been sawed until his chest) while Guru Tegh Bahadur looks on.

Move on to the next painting and it shows you a guy being boiled alive, again with Guru Tegh Bahadur presiding. Apparently the guy’s death wish was that he looks at the Guru while he is being boiled to death. Again fascinating indeed. Then later, there is this guy (one of the Gurus only I think) who is placed on a hot tawa and burnt to death.

Amit, Aadisht and Gaspode will be especially pleased to see the next part of the museum which shows the mutilation of babies. The story goes that while all the Sikh men of a cerrtain town were away the Mughals attack the town. There are only women and children remaining. They take the kids one by one, cut them up into pieces and string their organs together in the form of garlands and put it around their mothers’ necks. Unmitigated gore wonly.

One can say that the underlying theme of the museum, and maybe of Sikh history, is gore, violence, bloodbath, sacrifice, valour, whatever you call it. There are several paintings (most of these paintings are recent, btw) which depict battlefields and the common theme there is the severed heads and limbs that are lying on the ground. Then there is a series of paintings with Mughal soldiers holding up heads of Sikh men in order to claim their reward.

The last couple of halls of the museum are filled with portraits of recent Sikh leaders and I didn’t really bother to check the details there. At least I can confirm that there wasn’t any gore there. Overall it took me about 45 minutes to cover the museum (of course I read the story beside each and every painting – wherever English text was available) so I might have taken more time than a lot of other visitors. And got absolute strength level fundaes on Sikh history.

I strongly urge you to visit this museum the next time you are in Amritsar. I would advise you to visit this before you visit the langar, else you have a good chance of throwing up – there is so much gore in there. Also, if you are the weak hearted type who cries on the sight of blood, skip the museum altogether.

Temples

I’ve never been the religious type. I seldom go to temples. I seldom go to temples in my own city. I do visit temples when I’m traveling, but that is more as a tourist attraction. I’ve been to Tirupati once (Boxing Day 1991) and to Mantralaya twice and am not keen to visit either place again. After my first visit there in 1990, I would consider the Annapurna temple  in Horanadu (near Chickmagalur) as my favourite temple. This was until a year ago when I visited it again and got pissed off by the crowds and formalities.

The amount I contribute to the Hundi in temples is also highly variable, and a direct function of how much I like the temple. I consider my contribution to the Hundi as my contribution for the upkeep and maintenance of the temple, and in support of the temple’s activities (for example, I tend to put in a higher amount in temples which serve free food). If I don’t like a temple, I just make a token contribution of Rs. 2 or Rs. 5 and flee. Also, I usually make my contributions to the Hundi, and not to the plate that comes along with the mangalaarathi. This is to ensure that the priest doesn’t kult my contribution.

Some temples do end up making me feel spiritual. It is hard to describe that feeling but let me tell you that it is the same that I felt when I smoked my first cigarette (and decided that smoking was too addictive to take up as a hobby and abandoned it). It is that feeling of inner calm. It is that feeling of being at complete peace with oneself. Sadly I haven’t felt that way at any temple since I started earning, else that temple might have been blessed with a fat contribution from my wallet.

I find the temples in North India too noisy. I remember literally running away from the ISKCON temple in Delhi six years ago because I thought it looked like a discotheque – loud devotional songs and people dancing. Today I went to a couple of temples near Connaught Place and it was similar – loud bhajans on one side, astrologers sitting all around the temple, and general disorder everywhere else. There was no way that temple could offer any peace or calm or any spiritual benefit. I fought with my mother when she insisted I should contribute at least Rs. 10 to the Hundi.

My contribution to temples is also an inverse function of its popularity – I usually contribute less at more popular temples because I can freeride on the rest of the visitors’ contribution. If it is a smaller temple and if i like it, I feel more responsible to contribute towards its upkeep.

And when I go to a temple, I always get archane done. That way, I definitely get some sugar candy!

And why do I not want to go back to Tirupati? Because I think it is too crowded to offer any kind of spiritual benefit. And Mantralaya? The last time I went there someone got a special pooja done in my name and as “prasad”, the swami there threw a towel on my back, and then threw an orange and asked me to catch it. I find that demeaning and don’t want to go back there again. Oh, and I wasn’t let in to the dining hall since I wasn’t wearing my sacred thread.

Shivarathri

Today is Shivarathri. It is a holiday for the National Stock Exchange, which has made it an optional holiday for us (there are 10 such days of which we can choose 3). And I’ve chosen to exercise this option today. Sitting at home and battling internal demons. And saying goodbye to winter.

My mother says that the fact that it has become considerably hotter today points to the greatness of God. “It is ordained that on the day of Shivarathri, winter will cry ‘shiva shiva’ and run away, and that it has suddenly become hot today is an indication that God still makes nature obey ‘the laws’ “.

I agree with her argument but not with her conclusion. I say that the fact that winter seems to be on its way out today, on the day of Shivarathri, points to the greatness of the people who made our calendar. That they managed to study the stars accurately, and came up with a sustainable forecast regarding the closing date for winter that is valid even thousands of years hence is a good indication of how brilliant they were.

Like that coffee bite argument used to say, the argument continues.

Today being Shivarathri also means that it should be a night dedicated to the lingam – the most commonly worshipped form of Shiva. I wonder how many people are currently looking at their hands and thinking of a form of Vishnu that is worshipped in Puri.

This morning, my neighbour went to a nearby Shiva temple, to take part in something like “linga abhishekam”. She took along a mixture of milk, ganga jal (water from the Ganga; not H2SO4 of Bhagalpur) and sugar to do the pooja. Later on, my mother was on the phone with her sister, and after a long philosophical discussion they concluded that women doing the “linga abhishekam” is not part of South Indian Brahmin culture.

The Enhanced DTPH Theory

Dil To Pagal Hai (DTPH) was a nice movie. I really enjoyed it when I first saw it some eleven years ago. The only problem was the message it imprinted on my 15-year-old mind: someone, somewhere is made for you. It ended up completely messing me up for the next 3-4 years.  I took it at face value. Every time I met a new girl, I would start asking the question “is she the someone, somewhere who is made for me?”. I would be lucky if the answer was an immediate no.

As I had explained in a blog post almost three years ago, these kind of questions never give “yes” as an answer. They either say “no” or they say “maybe”. And the maybes are a problem, since a few years down the line they might be converted to a “no”. They will never turn into a “yes”, mind you, and if you are forced to make a decision, you’ll have to make do with the number of occurrences of maybe and the confidence bounds that it produces. So the maybes were a problem for me 10 years ago. I didn’t know how to handle them. And in the one case where the answer consistently came out to be “maybe” (even when i ask the question now, it comes out to be “maybe”), I royally messed up the blade. Disaster was an overstatement.

Now that the digression is done, DTPH similarly messed up thousands of young minds all over the country. It didn’t even spare the married. Everyone started asking themselves the question “is this the someone somewhere that is made for me?” I think Yash Chopra (he directed it, didn’t he?) should shoulder a large part of the blame for the spurt in suicides in the late 90s.

The theory I’m going to state now was first stated by Neha a couple of years back. Back then, I’d thought I need to blog it, since she wasn’t blogging then. She has started blogging recently, but still I think I’ll write about this. As you might have figured out from the title, I call this the Enhanced DTPH Theory. It is quite ironical that this is coming from the fairly irreligious me, since it somewhat endorses creationism. I know the inherent contradictions here, but I think I should write it anyway.

The theory states that there are several people, in several places, who are “made for you” (if you are religious) or are “inherently compatible with you” (if you are not). The key is in finding at least one of them and making things work.

I think this is easier on people’s minds. The constant quest to find “the best partner” should be laid to rest, I think, mainly because it is unlikely that you’ll find a “dominating partner” (someone who is better, in your eyes, than everyone else that you could’ve  gotten married to). Instead, what you will get is what I can call as a “dominating set” – a set of people who are collectively dominating over the rest of the population but cannot really be compared to each other.

Each person has his/her own different evaluation criteria. And based on that, each person has his/her own dominating set. And it is this dominating set that is the “several people who are made for you”. I suppose you are getting the drift. I know this is a bit confusing.

Then, you need to understand that the universe doesn’t obey the Hall’s Marriage Theorem. This is trivial to prove since the total number of men exceeds the total number of women. Actually, as a corollary to this, we can establish that the original DTPH theory is false, unless of course it assumes that the population of gays is significantly higher than the population of lesbians, or if it takes into account animal sex.

Some hand-waving here, but my next hypothesis is that Hall’s Theorem doesn’t hold for local smaller populations also. I’ll probably try give an explanation of this in a subsequent post (else there would be no reason for women to remain single).

Tailpiece: The cost of not marrying the “right person” is significantly lower than the cost of marrying the wrong person.

PS: I also acknowledge Baada’s contribution to the development of this theory.

Avatars

This is regarding the Avatars of Vishnu.  It is quite fascinating how Buddha managed to enter the list (he is number 9 on the list). Apparently a number of communities give that spot to Balarama (Krishna’s brother), notably Iyengars and other Vaishnavite communities. I have also seen this in a few temples (don’t know which “denomination” (if such a thing exists in Hinduism) these temples belong to) which have Balarama as #9.

The most popular explanation (which I have no reason to disagree with) about the Buddha’s entry into the list is that it was a clever ploy to prevent the spread of Buddhism, which threatened to become the largest religion in the subcontinent in the few centuries before and after christ. By including Buddha in the Hindu Pantheon, and by declaring him to be an avatar of Vishnu, an attempt was made to describe Buddhism as just a branch of Hinduism. Looking at the way Buddhism has developed after that in the subcontinent, I have reason to believe that the ploy was successful.

Regarding the construction of the list, there are again two possibilities. One view says that it was constructed not more than two millenia ago, and it was constructed only as a response to Buddhism. That it was something like “Ok here is the Buddha. He threatens us. So let’s make him one of ours. Let us declare him to be an Avatar of Vishnu. But then, we need more avatars to make this look credible. Let us include evolution into this and put in a few animals, etc. and have a nice list. But we have only 9, and there is no logical person who can finish this list. So let’s assume that he will happen sometime in the future, when the world ends. So here is The List”.

The other possibility is that one such list already existed, and the Buddha was included in the list. Though 8 is not an inauspicious number, it is unlikley that there were originally 8 avatars. Which means that there were originally 10, including possibly Kalki, and the Buddha replaced one of these 10. Looking at the other popular version of the Dashavatara, it is likely that the Buddha replaced Balarama in the list.

This raises a couple of interesting questions:

  • What avatarish thing did Balarama achieve in order to be an avatar? Which demon did he kill? I only recall him being mentioned fleetingly in the early stages of the Mahabharata, and he walked away from the war later on. So what message did he carry?
  • Balarama being an avatar, and his being a brother of another avatar Krishna, means that two avatars coexisted. In fact, someone on the list pointed out that Parashurama is a Chiranjeevi, so he has coexisted with all avatars following him. So we need to dissociate the avatar concept from the concept of rebirth and reincarnation. In any case, fascinating stuff
  • It is remarkable that Hinduism was flexible and nimble enough to turn the Buddha into an avatar when they saw him threaten them. The presence of mind of the people who thought of this workaround is commendable. I wonder where Hinduism lost its flexibility after that.
  • I also wonder how this was implemented. Hinduism has no supreme leader. And in the days when the Buddha was included into the list, there wasn’t even a Postal system, leave alone conference call facilities. How did this idea spread and gain enough credence to become the norm, then? Where did this idea of making the Buddha an avatar originate? How did t hey disseminate it? Who was the powerful set of people who were instrumental in the design, development and distribution of this idea?

It’s all fascinating stuff. And if any of you have any theories regarding the points I’ve raised here, please leave a comment.

Mantras: Songs Fooled By Randomness?

A couple of weeks back, I happened to read Frits Staal’s Discovering the Vedas. I was initially skeptical of the book since it has been blurbed by Romila Thapar, thinking it might be some commie propaganda, but those fears were laid to rest after I read Staal’s interpretation of the so-called “Aryan Invasion Theory” and found it quite logical. I enjoyed the first half of the book, and then lost him. I couldn’t understand anything at all in the second half of the book.

The precise moment where I lost interest in the book was when Staal gave his theory as to why mantras and rituals have no meaning. I found his reasoning of the same quite weak, and since he kept referring back to that later in the book, it became tough to follow. Staal states the following three reasons to claim that mantras precede language, and they are more like bird calls.

  • Mantras are language independent: Anything in language can be translated whereas mantras remain the same in all languages.
  • Mantras, even though they seem to be in a language like Sanskrit, are not used for their meaning.
  • Mantras follow patterns, like refrain, which is not seen in language.

While I find the hypothesis interesting, the proof that Staal gives is hopelessly inadequate. The Beatles might have translated their songs into German, but songs are normally not translated, right? You don’t translate songs, and sing  them into the same tune, unless you are doing some MTV Fully Faltoo or some such thing. On the other hand, what if the songs are in a language that is completely alien to you? There is no way you can translate them, but since you like them you sing them anyway. Without bothering to know their meaning. And songs can definitely have refrain, right? It clearly seems like Staal is trying to force-fit something here. Hopefully he is force-fitting this here so as to prove some other theory of his. But you can never say.

As I had expected, Staal’s theory has caught the attention of the right-wing blogosphere. JK at Varnam writes

This athirathram, which was extensively covered in Malayalam newspapers, was highly respectful and the words I heard were not “playful” or “pleasurable.” I can understand singing for pleasure, but am yet to meet a priest who said, “it’s a weekend and raining outside, let’s do a ganapati homam for pleasure.”

Sandeep at sandeepweb goes one step further, and says:

Even a Hindu not well-versed with the nuances of Mantra intuitively senses that something “divine” or “other-worldly” is associated with every Mantra. In a very crude sense, a Mantra is to some people, a cost-benefit equation: you chant the Gayatri Mantra for spiritual upliftment, the Maha Mrityunajaya to ward off the fear of death, the Surya Mantras for health, and so on. Why, you chant just the “primordial sound(sic),” “OM” to get yet another benefit. Whether these benefits really accrue or or not is not the point. What is immediately discernible is that every mantra is associated with some God or principle. In other words, it has a very specific meaning.

I think mantras are simply songs, in an ancient language, fooled by randomness. As I had explained before I quoted JK and Sandeep, going by Staal’s hypothesis, and the precise reasons that he gives, it is not inconceivable that mantras were composed as songs, in a language that hasn’t survived. In fact, Staal’s “proof” can better explain the song hypothesis rather than a no-language hypothesis. I don’t know why those songs were composed, and I definitely won’t rule out the possibility that they were meant to be devotional (after all, a large amount of later Indian music (including all of Carnatic music) is fundamentally devotional). Anyways the exact reasons for composition may not matter.

So what might have happened is this. I suppose chanting of mantras and conducting rituals was a fairly common event in the Vedic age. I believe that we started off with a much larger repository of mantras and rituals compared to what survive today. And the ones that survive are the ones that were lucky enough to have been associated with certain good events. A chieftan happened to do a certain ritual before going to battle, which he happened to win. And this ritual came to become the “pre-war” ritual. Of course it wouldn’t have been one single event that would have established this as “the” pre-war ritual, but after a couple of “successive trials”, this would have become the definitive pre-war ritual.

Once a particular ritual or mantra got associated with a particular event, then reinforcement bias kicked in. Since it was now “established”, any adverse results were seen as being “in spite of”. Suppose a king dutifully did the pre-war ritual before he got thrashed in battle, people would say “poor guy. in spite of religiously doing his rituals he has lost”. The establishment meant that no one would question the supposed effectiveness of the ritual. And so forth for other mantras and rituals.

To summarize, we started off with a significantly larger number of mantras than we have today. Association of certain mantras with certain “good events” meant two things. One, they got instantly associated with such good events, and two, they got preference in propagation – limited bandwidth of oral tradition meant only a certain number could be passed on sustainably, and these “lucky mantras” (notice the pun – they brought luck, and they survived) became the “chosen ones”.

The sad part in the whole deal is that mantras were taught without explaining the meaning (similarly wiht rituals). Maybe the oral tradition didn’t permit too much bandwidth, and in their quest to learn the maximum number of mantras possible, people gave short shrift to the meanings. And by the time writing was established, the language had changed and the meaning of the mantras lost forever. In fact, this practice of mugging up mantras also gets reflected in the way education happens in India today, with an emphasis on knowledge rather than understanding. I suppose I’ll cover that in a separate blog post.

Mata Amrita Index

There are many kinds of people in the world. There are those that hug everyone they meet. Then there are those who start fidgeting when their bodies come somewhat close to that of other people (I assume these people don’t travel by Mumbai local trains). There are the sexist ones – who only hug people of their own sex, and there are those who reserve their hugs exclusively for people of the opposite sex. Some people don’t actively hug, but gracefully comply when someone goes out to hug them. And yet others say “tchee tchee” and run when someone wants to hug them.

Given such diversity, what we need is a simple measure to classify people, so that such classification might probably be of use to marketers. The measure that I propose in this essay is by no means simple, yet it is a start. The measure that I propose is a real number, no less than zero, no greater than one. The definition of this number isn’t clean. It involves a little bit of math, and by math I mean math, not just arithmetic. I also complicate it a little bit by proposing a couple of related measures, which, though not as simple as the main index number, are capable of offering much better insight.

The measure I am proposing here is named after the great Mellu saint Mata Amritanandamayi (Mata Amrita for short), also known as “the hugging saint”. Mata Amrita has the policy of hugging her followers in order to deliver her blessings, which is a marked improvement over most other Indian godmen and godwomen who ask their followers to touch their feet. In fact, there is probably no other public figure who is as famous for hugging people.  Another factor that goes into the choice of this name is that it is generally nice to have your concept linked to a holy person. If not anything else, the concept will be blessed with some good Karma.

Coming to the measure itself, Baada says that the word “index” might be misleading, and it should be called the “Mata Amrita Number” instead. However, “Index” sounds so much better in this context, and MAI is a much better acronym than MAN. I need to mention right up front that the MAI is an absolute index, and is not a relative index. Each and every man and woman and transsexual has his or her own MAI. And there is also a “bilateral MAI” which is defined for pairs of people, but we will come to that later.

The Mata Amrita Index for a person is defined as the likelihood of him or her hugging the next random person he/she meets.

The Bilateral Mata Amrita Index for a pair of persons is defined as the likelihood of this pair hugging each other the next time they meet each other.

Yes, as simple as that. Or maybe not, since likelihood is not such a simple concept. But then, I’m sure you are getting the drift. What complicates the first definition is the word “Random” (towards the end). The reason this un-natural random word has been inserted in there is to add stability to a person’s MAI. So that a person’s MAI is not influenced by the knowledge of who he/she is going to meet next. I hope you are getting the drift. If you aren’t, leave a comment and I’ll explain with examples. However, there is no such complication in case of the bilateral index since it is defined for a pair.

Now, I suppose that it is intuitive that a person’s MAI is a weighted average of the person’s BMAI with all the people he knows, weighted by the frequency of meeting each such person. So for example, there is a bunch of people whom I hug every time I meet them (high BMAI), but I don’t meet these people too often, so my overall MAI remains low. And so forth.

Oh, and by definition Mata Amrita herself has a MAI of 1, since she deterministically hugs every random person she meets.

Long ago, people used to say “honey, give me a hug”. That is so passe now. That is so 20th century. Now, you are supposed to say “let us enhance our Mata Amrita Index”.

Update

I hereby thank my FGB*, the Flower Of Tam Brahm Womanhood (FOTBW) Nityag and my stalker Priyanka for their cantributions to this theory. I also thank Kodhi and Aadisht for gratefully listening to the theory when I first proposed it to them. And I thank Baada also, for his critical analysis and constant encouragement. Last but not the least, I thank my school classmate Kavya who is the chief inspiration behind this concept. In fact, I dedicate this concept to Kavya.

*FGB = foremost girl buddy