The New Year has finally arrived. 2013 is here. My facebook notifications are surprisingly below 30! Can you believe that? A wonder it is! People are busy celebrating and welcoming the new year with mirth and joy it appears. As I was going through my newsfeed, I discovered there is a growing concern in the back of people’s minds about this year being unlucky since it has the number 13 in it. Well paradoxical isn’t it? If you know it’s unlucky and will bring you bad luck then why welcome the year with glorious festivity? Well, people always have to create some kind of superstitious, destructive myths around them to carry on I guess. In 2012 it was about the world heading toward destruction, and now the number 13 being unlucky. If you think back now, you’d die laughing! 😀 Some very intelligent people of this earth even made various arrangements for survival, spending loads of money, as they awaited for mayhem to break out. Were they hoping to be the next Noah with the Arc? Well wasn’t that a painful joke now?
What intrigues me most is what did these people plan on doing post apocalypse? Lets suppose the world is ending and one of these great thinking gentleman has a boat that can survive all the tsunamis that were to occur if you follow the film 2012. So he has stocked up on food for lots of days and remains in the boat for a long time. Then what? They don’t have navigation since land has shifted from this end to that, there is water every where, their food will eventually finish, then in the end even they will die. So what would have been the point of it all? Dying there all alone, wouldn’t it have been better to die with the rest of your species? Well that’s all a thing of the past now. For the time being, focus has shifted from apocalypse to superstition. And the hot topic is, whether or not 2013 will bring bad luck to the life of people.
Superstitions have an aura of their own. There are several superstitious activities people perform each day, sometimes not even consciously ware of the reasons and the motives of such acts. Its just something mommy said when we were a child and we never thought twice before doing those silly things even when we’re old enough. Things like stopping if a cat crosses your path, kissing your fingers in acknowledgment when you see two ‘shalik’ birds as its supposed to bring joy. And it gets on my nerves when people are overreacting ‘cause they saw only one bird and not a pair and believe that something bad will happen in the course of the day. It gets really annoying at time because frankly it never made any difference for me. In fact, I have diligently noted for quite sometime now, when a cat crosses my path, my day goes really well, or when I se only one of those wretched birds, something sweet might happen all of a sudden. May be it’s the supernatural’s way of messing with my head which I’ll probably never get to understand! 
But there is this one superstitious custom which is strikingly awesome. Mom says if you have gathered too much of a negative attention from people, that is jealousy mostly, the evil eye as some may call it, there is a way to test it and most probably nullifies the negativism even. She takes a few dried chilies, takes each one and waves it from top to bottom of my body and then put it in the open flame of the burner. She does so with each of the chilies. And surprisingly, not even a little bit of smell of the chilies are released. That’s a sign of whether you have received the so called evil eye of others. It didn’t really gel with me, I was curious how that could happen because I knew how pungent the smell of chilies can be-u can’t remain in the room I bet! So this one particular time Id thought that may be the chilies are some how defected so I took out a few more from the container. I turned on the gas burner and put a chili on the flame and within seconds that fiery pungent aroma was released! All the other chilies needn’t be tested. Point taken, case settled. This is a creepily true phenomenon and has always bugged. If anyone knows any scientific explanation, do throw some light on the matter and free me from the creepy bug inside my head 😉
Hope that 2013 isn’t unlucky..umm..no, cross that!
Well, here’s to this brand new just unpacked year. Whether or not it’s unlucky is yet to be proven, but the human spirit is an unbreakable lot, as so passionately demonstrated by the gentlemen planning to escape apocalypse. Happy new year my friends!
pynkalicious 