Dear Editor,
Educated persons holding constitutional posts have been giving statements which are against Article 51A (h) of our Constitution that says “It shall be the duty of every citizen of India to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform”.
The recent example of such a statement by a dignitary is about evolution which says that evolution is wrong as nobody saw man descend from apes! But had there been no evolution, could that person have had command of a language to speak out his imagination?
Another such memorable observation is that which says a peahen drinks peacock’s tears to get a peachick! But had it been a biological fact then we must have had a ministry of utmost family planning!
The third example must be the one which declared that an elephant’s head was fitted on Lord Ganesha’s body by plastic surgery! If mythological characters like Lord Ganesha of India and the Sphinx of Greece happened to be the products of surgery then it must have been something more than surgical strike of plastic surgery! Even in this modern digital age, to fit and match an elephant’s head with a human body or a human head with a lion’s body is totally beyond any surgeon’s wildest dreams!
Our political parties are going soft towards regressive prejudices or sometimes even using such myths in their favour as they think those nonsense stuffs will give them vote – bank dividend. It is an irony that when Raja Rammohan Roy had successfully guided even a reluctant foreign company (East India) to the path of reform in the eighteen century India, Davolkar and the likes could not take democratic governments of free India in the twenty first century from the narrow lane which is potholed with myths, superstitions and prejudices to the constitutional highway of scientific temper.
Some years ago, there was mass hysteria when the idols of Lord Ganesha started sucking milk in many parts of our country. Some regressive forces tried to siphon off whatever scientific temper we had at our disposal with such siphoning trick. Given advertisements for vashikaran for taming a person are mushrooming day by day, they must have been doing a brisk trade. This means that the umpteenth number of our brothers and sisters are being slow poisoned in the name of vashikaran or taming!
Yours,
Sujit De,
Kolkata