JAY JOSHI
A few days ago, there was a lot of excitement as some deeply spiritual and devoted souls happened to spot the image of Sai Baba on surface of the moon. Also, thanks to the social media, the word (and the picture of the said phenomenon) spread like wildfire and people were striving to take a glimpse at the holy image on moon. To be fair, the event is not unusual in a country such as India which has been privy to countless such instances in the past (and they keep occurring even when we are now in 2018).
Secondly, many educated people too could be seen staring at the moon in wonder, while another educated bunch of people sought to prove how the phenomenon is purely a game of the human mind. “This is a mass induced hysteria” says Satish Naik, President of Public Astronomical Observatory, Panaji “When you have a thought or devotion in your mind about something, you will see it. It has nothing to do with reality,” Naik says, adding that he had astro-photographers take pictures of the moon on that day, and the pictures were perfectly clear, devoid of any such holy image. He further points out that the human senses and human mind have the tendency to draw on past experiences and project patterns in places where there are none. This phenomenon is called Pareidolia
“There is a difference between an ‘educated’ person and a ‘literate’ person,” says Dr Somu Rao. “People who fall for such things are ‘literate’ but not ‘educated’. This happens because of conditioning of the mind. Right from childhood we are conditioned to believe in these things. No matter how ‘literate’ we are, this conditioning is always there. Education has nothing to do with it. This has to do with scientific temper, and our education not exactly helping develop this temper,” Rao cites that Article 51 H of the Indian constitution makes it a fundamental duty of Indian citizens, and by failing to do that, we are in a way violating the Constitution. “Majority of the mental conditioning takes place till a child reaches the age of 7 years. Everything that your brain learns after that age can be deleted, but what you learn till the age of seven stays with you.” Thus, we need to be careful of what we teach our children to believe.
While the serious rationalists were busy outlining scientific reasons for why the event occurred, the more jolly ones were busy pulling off their own moon miracles. Margao based writer Prasad Raicar shared a picture of the lunar surface showing his own face and urged people not to believe in such occurrences. “It’s amazing how people are so gullible and believe anything in the name of God. Many people follow some ridiculous social norms only out of fear of the rest of the society. This is herd mentality. Also, doing such things has become a kind of business.” By sharing his picture, Prasad was trying to show how images could be morphed to create a particular impression, but instead, he received phone calls stating that with his action, he had insulted the Divine entities. “It is not me who is ridiculing God. In fact the people who take the faith in God to the level of blind superstitions are the ones insulting the Almighty,” said the writer.
