As a person with a logical and progressive mindset, I’ve had just enough of our country’s tolerance for superstitions. Especially after the chaos that we have witnessed during recent times, it’s necessary that we make our voices heard.
I’m sure that most of us are aware of these beliefs and take part in them willingly or unwillingly. One can casually argue that every culture around the globe has its own set of superstitious beliefs, and people have learned to live with them.
But at the end of the day, we should also keep in mind that these casual blind practices slowly start weighing in on a society’s logical progression and in a time of crisis impairs its citizens’ vision and action.
We have all seen people risking road safety, just because they think that an animal’s gesture controls their fate. TV channels hosting and advertising god-men, people justifying their destiny by stars, and getting scammed by the so-called mind readers.
As bad are these sound from a modern-day perspective, superstitious beliefs take a grim turn in rural India with people dying of animal attacks just because they were taken to some quack practitioners instead of a legit hospital, witch- hunts that often take lives of the innocent and many more bizarre incidents that have no place in this day and age.
If you think that these were the worst of it, the pandemic made our people do some stomach-churning cringe, and outright life-threatening practices leaving the country’s healthcare system in total disarray.
Many folks in tier 1 cities chose to show a complete disregard for modern-day science and opted for quack remedies, anecdotes, and religious gatherings while rural India decided to turn the clock behind with medieval rituals and animal sacrifices to fend off the virus.
As a woke citizen of a country that is trying to achieve globalization, I feel that our government is not well-equipped with the necessary tools to tackle this social disease. A soft stance of not hurting religious sentiments for political benefits is taking us decades back.
A country that proudly boasts of Swami Vivekananda and Raja RamMohan Roy as founders of modern India, should not only hear speeches about them from politicians. Rather, we should experience their teachings of social reforms in its governance.
Since our independence, we have struggled to achieve a high enough literacy rate to make our population embrace science and technology at a rural level. A significant improvement in this field along with strict amendments and laws will encourage logical thinking among the youth as well as curb malpractices and false beliefs.
At the same time, there is only so much that a government can do, until and unless we the progressive generation collectively shed our casual approach towards these beliefs and start demanding logic from blind believers and followers around us.
In the end, we need to remind ourselves that we should not confuse these primitive beliefs with the ethos of our country and play an active role in abolishing them from society. This goal can only be achieved when the people along with its government start considering superstitions as a serious obstacle to development and take tangible actions against them hand in hand.