Evil Eye for an Atheist

Often when things are not going good for a long time, or some bad thing happened all of a sudden, people say the evil eye has struck.

In India especially you will come across this a lot. We call it “buri nazar“. Its a sort of a malevolent glare, given to people when they are unaware. Now usually its not supposed to be evil. In our culture it’s believed that when someone is praised by many people, maybe for some achievement or quality/hobby , he/she is prone to evil eye. Maybe out of sheer jealousy of someones achievments or some quality.

Now I’m a big atheist, when it comes to god/spirits/prayer/myth/believes, I just leer away from such people, although I do enjoy such conversations because deep down in my mind I laugh at the person speaking. I don’t believe in things I don’t see, however this is a very ironic statement coz after every time I watch a horror movie I seem to see the demon/ghost of that movie in my house, but ya I know it’s my imagination, still I get petrified. I’m a science student. Unless until god will himself come and stand in front of me and show some magic trick so he/she can qualify as one, maybe then also I won’t believe coz we have a lot of tricksters in this human race.

But, there’s this one thing that I have started to believe in and maybe you readers will too when you read more of the post.

So ‘buri nazar’ is something really famous in India. Yea I used to word famous. There are a lot of things people do to save themselves from it. I’m not gonna discuss all except for one which just works… Even though my dad… A rigid science person like him, also believes in this. In india we have a term ‘totka’ for this kind of stuff. So in typical hindi language if I may put it….its the most effective totka.

So I’ll walk you guys through this totka. So a wick is made out of a cotton roll and is dipped in mustard oil. This is then taken to the affected person and moved 7 times anti clockwise around the head of the person. Later its taken to a drain area in the house, preferably kitchen, and its hung over the ground and the lit using a matchstick. The intensity of the flame and the dripping sound indicate the presence and strength of evil eye. Once the entire thing catches fire its dropped and crushed by the slippers and a dab of the black residue is taken and put on the forehead of the person. If there is no dripping and cotton burns soundlessly then there is no evil eye.

Now you might be thinking we are lunatics but trust me, this is crazy…. A few years back my dog was very sick…he got tick fever, my mom performed this… The cotton roll did not catch fire for first 5 mins and when it did…. It started dripping with a very strange noise. Then few years back my dog was again not well….my mom tried again and guess what… The cotton burned with no noise and no fireballs. Now recently my dog has got a severe attack of arthritis, my mom did the totka again a few days back….and it took a whole lot of time to catch fire and created crazy noise. Its strange because its the same items used everytime in same proportion and same environment yet the results are different everytime.

I have a white labrador and a real good looking dog… And he’s super prone to evil eye, I believe it now because this has happened so many times… Everytime some stranger appreciates him….something happens to him. So now as a preventive thing we put a “kala teeka” on him, its basically a line of black liner in the middle of the forehead. Its also one of the totka’s to save someone from evil eye.

Different countries have different ways of saving or treating someone who has caught evil eye. What are yours? Do drop them in the comment section below.