Astrology

This was the conversation in my house yesterday... I will retain the technical terms, please bear with it.

Dad( To grandpa): When can I buy the vehicle?
Grandpa: Hmmmm (takes out panchanga) lets see... monday is pretty good
Dad: But the vehicle will come to the showroom only by monday evening.
G: Oh, ok. Tuesday is ruled out. Wednesday.... hmmm it might not suit you. What about thursday?
D: But I am busy on thursday.
G: In that case why not the next day?
Me: (getting irritated, In a mocking voice) Oh, but isnt it a friday? The engine might rust and the wheel might refuse to turn.
(Get shouted at by everybody else in the house)(After regaining composure..)
G: All days are ok... other than tuesday you take it whenever you want.

Me (To myself): WTF... That's what I have been saying for days!!

Another dialogue that many of us would have heard before in our lives, one of my favourite ones by the way, "Don't talk about things you don't understand".

What is this whole big deal with astrology anyway? I really dont see any sense in people dedicating their entire lives to astrology. Agreed, it is a science, people were able to predict the exact time of the sunrise today a thousand years back. But that is math and math has no time frame. I am talking about the prediction part. That is so not scientific.

I happen to listen to a lot of these astrology shows and there is one show i absolutely love. It comes in "Suvarna", a kannada channel in the morning conducted by one Mr. Narendra Babu Sharma. These are some of the things he asks people to do, some one please tell me the logic behind any of this...

1) Girls should not wear anything that even closely resembles a pant because it will not allow free passage of air and that is Rahu's strength and he will surely damage your chances of getting offspring later on.

2) What to do if you think someone has put a curse on you (its something similar to voodoo dolls) First take a lemon. IT should be the exact size of the inside of a coconut. Then you piss into a glass in the morning and keep it in the north east corner of your house. After performing pooja with a lot of devotion, you pray to the lemon and drop it into your piss and keep it there for 2 days. It is very important that you do not look into the glass of your piss. After 2 days if the lemon has turned read then someone has put a curse on you, if it only stinks then you are safe.

I will not go on about what to do if you are cursed...

Dude WTF!! You are not only talking to your generation. You words also fall into the ears of GenX. If you tell me not to wear jeans because the sun wont like it or Shani is behind Ketu who is the sister's son of the moon who is in my rashi right now, all I will do is get you on an auto to NIMHANS. All the sun can do if i am wearing jeans is make it hot so i sweat and... well lets just leave it there...

Coming back to my favourite sentence "Don't speak about things you don't understand". I agree that I don't know anything. I am just 18 years old. I might not have studied all the vedas and sacred texts, but God has granted me enough brains to understand what is taught to me. I ask you people to make us understand. If you can truly show me that it is bad for me to wear jeans because the sun wont like it or shani is behind rahu blah blah blah, I will follow it. If not then I wont until I am convinced otherwise.

The problem with most people who say that is they have never asked their fathers why all these customs are followed.
I shall now narrate a story to prove my point. "Once upon a time a boy in the family got married. The wife came into the kitchen the next morning and saw her mother-in-law cooking fish. She was surprised to see the MIL cut off the head and the tail and keep them next to the body and then cook it. She asked her MIL why she was doing it. The MIL said that that was the tradition in this shouse and fish has been cooked like this for ages and that is the reason for their good health. The wife was not convinced and asked her again. The MIL again hid behind the wall of tradition and asked her to approach the boy's grandmother who taught her to cook that way. On hearing the story, the old woman just chuckled and said "My daughter, when I ran the house, the vessel I used could not contain the whole fish, so to fit the fish into the vessel I would cut the head and the tail and keep them next to body."

So much for tradition. What if some of the things we do on the pretext of following our tradition actually had some such reason behind it and how foolish would all of us feel if we actually got to know such a dumb reason?

Think about it...