The Indian Strange Customs

INDIA

Strange customs and tradition.

As everybody knows around the world there are a lot of differences, traditions, manners and practices rooted to different people, country and continents. Also, we know that there are big cultural differences between western people and Asian people, these differences are so big in some cases that these practices, manners or customs are for us incomprehensible, weird, dangerous and in some cases nasty.

In this article, I’m going to refer to India, a country located in the south of the Asian Continent, the seventh land extension and the second most populated in the world. I’m going to talk about some of their strange manners and customs.

I’m going to begin with a ritual called THE BURNING OF WIDOWS OR SATI.

THE BURNING OF WIDOWS OR SATI.

The Sati ritual consist that the woman whose husband died sometimes voluntary and sometimes obligated, they burned themselves with their husband’s bodies. In India the people customary cremate the bodies when the people die; cremation is carried out the next day that the person dies. So generally the widows have a short time to decide if she wants to be burned with her husband or not. Today there are discussions about of the volunteer decision of the women; a lot of people think that these women could be acting under society pressure.

The Ritual is now legally prohibited; however there are a lot of people that practice this ritual.

WORSHIP RATS

The Indian people have worship to the rats, this worship is explained for a god called KARNI MATA, She was a matriarch from XIV century the legend says she was the reincarnation of the DURGA the god of the victory and power.

The legend says that one child of her men´s clan died, and she tried come back to the life, to make that she had to appeal to LAMA the death god.

The dead god did a deal with her, but he put a condition the condition was that everybody that integrated her clan ought to reincarnate in rat until they were ready to reincarnate in the tribe again.

The rats are respected because the people think they are the reincarnation of KARNI MATA and of her followers.

They built a temple for the rats, called the KARNI MATA TEMPLE. This temple was built in 1900 by MAHARAJA GANGA SINGH. It is located in a city called DESNOKE, where around twenty thousand rats live. The people go to the temple where the rats walk around their feet and the people eat with the rats.