If you have eyes to put, put them here...

If you have eyes to put, put them here...

One of the regular readers of this blog enquired about the lack of posts for a week now. When I said that I didn’t seem to have anything to write about apart from being a little busy, she said “writer’s block? That must be because of all the drishti. You just boasted about 500 posts and see it has affected you immediately.”
Of course she was joking as neither of us believe in all this kann drishti/ buri nazar/ evil eye theory and find it amusing when not being irritated by it.

While growing up in our house in Chennai, we had rented out a portion to a family and every friday evening , they had a ritual to remove the effects of evil eyes that may have been cast on the members of the family. The grandmother of the house made them all sit together and held some chillies and salt in her fist and made circles in front of them – 3 times clockwise and 3 times anti clockwise, all the time murmuring something about defusing all bad eyes . During this process no one was allowed to speak. After this, she threw the chillies and salt on some live coal kept in the backyard. While we choked over the pungent smoke that wafted from the backyard into our side of the house, she always commented , “see, so many chillies and yet no trace of any pungency. That is all the drishti (evil eye) that has made the chillies so bland.”

The funny part was that we did not understand what was attracting all these alleged evil eyes to the members of their house – they were very ordinary people in every way, nothing exceptional, no super achievers. Apart from this weekly ritual, there were extraordinary drishti removing sessions if a child was sick or had a decreased appetite or if anyone came first in class or wore something new. Basically it appeared that the whole world had its evil eye focused on that family and every event in their house was something they looked upon with jealousy. The rest of us in the house were even scared to look at them properly or compliment them on anything for fear of being accused of casting drishti on them. Among ourselves though, in our irreverent way we called it ‘eye-putting’ (as a literal translation of the term in Tamil which was ‘kann podradu’ meaning casting eye). It was all so amusing to us that while playing if anyone sneezed or fell down we would make them sit on some steps and pronounce that people have kann potufied on her. Then one of us would imitate the ‘nazar utharna’ process of that old lady and we would all go into silly giggles. We were a wicked lot!

We were chided for this by the older people in our houses too who did not completely dismiss the power of evil eye in bringing distress to the object of the negative feelings but mercifully they drew the line at putting a black dot on children’s cheek or forehead to neutralise anything negative. I considered the old lady of the neighbourhood as a bit of a freak but over the years, I have been surprised that there is a similar superstition in almost every part of the country and across all levels of society – black dots, a string of chillies, crushing a lemon, burning camphor, breaking white pumpkin, hanging a scary face drawn on a pumpkin or made of papier mache and so on.

It is interesting how people fear losing their wealth, health or happiness by becoming the object of jealousy. In all this fear and insecurity they become incapable of accepting genuine appreciation without fearing that they are about to lose whatever it is that invited the appreciation. In fact, sometimes, I am scared to offer open praise about how beautiful and healthy a child looks or even how lovely someone’s house is. I don’t want them to blame my evil eye every time the child sneezes or has loose stools or there is an air- crack on their walls. Why should people be so insecure about what they have earned or achieved? Why do they fear losing something they know they deserve? or don’t they feel they actually deserve it?

At the root of it all, there seems to be a kind of acceptance that misery is a natural state and happiness is temporary even if you have worked for it and earned it; and an inability to have pure happiness with one's successes and prosperity without a tinge of guilt or fear. It seems that there is only so much supply of happiness and prosperity and you should feel guilty about having cornered a big chunk of it! So one fears losing one’s good fortune by flaunting it openly and attracting the evil eye through jealous thoughts. Perhaps these customs evolved to temper overt exhibition of wealth and conspicuous consumption so one did not increase the misery of the have-nots through comparison. It also became a convenient excuse to explain away failures and losses and sudden fluctuations in one's fortunes – ‘it is sombody else’s doing, not mine’.

When my son was about 4 months old he had a severe attack of bronchitis and he suffered from acute wheezing trouble. So his health had its waxing and waning phases every month. And my neighbours invariably advised me to do something to remove the effect of evil eyes. It was tough to resist when the issue in question was my child’s health but I refused to comply. He was cured by homeopathy and I don’t think the medicine had anything to do with defusing the drishti. But my good friends and colleagues often argued why I was so adamant about something so harmless which might, just might, do some good. This is why it is tough to get rid of superstitions because most of them seem totally harmless and if they worked, it was fine; if they didn’t, nothing lost. May be. But I wasn’t going to be party to something that cast a doubt on the rest of humanity as having an evil eye.

So there, I have told you, I do not have any problem about acceptance of your open praises and eulogies. So in case you have been holding them back for fear of being mistaken for kannu pottufying, please pull all stops and bring them on.