To each, his own!

Miniature boats on Karthika Purnima to commemorate 
the rich maritime glory of ancient Odisha. It marks the 
change of monsoon tides. Sail is set for Java from Odisha.

We like to convince ourselves that a particular ritual will help us in our life ahead. Perhaps paying tithe or giving alms will ease our path to salvation. They say that a cleansing bath in a specific lake on a particular day will symbolically wash away one's previous sins, even of previous births.

With the conviction that we had of our past lives and have more future births to sail through to attain Moksha, the breakaway from the curse of repeated birth and attainment of eternal bliss, we religiously indulge in this activity and that.

Karthik Bath in Odisha

The recurrent thought that has been going on throughout my life is this. Am I so lucky to have been told these secrets of life by virtue of my birth as a Hindu? My other good friends who, through no fault of theirs, had not been exposed to these intriguing shortcuts of attaining Satchiananda (existence consciousness bliss). But then, they too had their own pathways to the same. Sometimes our paths contradict each other, yet each is convinced of his own. 

When we were young, my sisters and I were repeatedly reminded to respect our school books and school bags. We were told the books were representations of Goddess Saraswathi, the goddess of knowledge. We could not be seen sitting on our bags or kicking or disrespecting another person's book. Our parents told us that we would eternally be cursed to be daft by invoking divine wrath! And there was he was, the top boy of the class, who would be resting his feet on his school bag whilst waiting for his mother's car but nothing terrible happened to him, academic wise!

What is good for the goose must surely be so for the gander, so I thought. When number 8 is auspicious for some, it is 9.

They both cannot be correct. One, or even both, could be wrong. There can either be a rebirth model or 'heaven and hell'. We cannot have both. Or, conversely, neither, after this life, is just void. Game over. White noise. Zzz...

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.