BOONS OR BANES?

All of us are quite familiar with people performing abhishekams or archanais in temples to various deities, or homams in their own houses, to propitiate some God or other with a view to seeking favours from them for better health, more wealth, higher position, greater status, progeny and whatever else. Broadly the objects of these prayers can be classified as benign or malignant in character. Mostly they are of the benign variety where people seek to get their basic needs filled to have a reasonable life-style, or want to have a child when they have none and so on. But there are people who seek favours of the malignant type, where they already have all that they need and more, but are so driven by greed, arrogance and so on that they want more of this and more of that so as to have power and control over people and society as a whole, and seek Divine help in fulfilling their ambitions which turn out to be antisocial in character. The favours that people seek through their prayers used to be called boons in earlier societies where we are led to believe that the Gods, pleased by their prayers, appeared in person before the supplicants, and bestowed the boons on them.

For the purposes of this discussion we are concerned more with the malignant type of boons with great propensity to cause enormous harm to society, and how the Gods dealt with them. The story of King Midas and his golden touch, one supposes, is very well known the world over. When Midas did something which pleased the God Dionysius, he appeared before Midas and granted him a boon. Midas thought for a while and decided that if everything that he touched turned into gold, he would become the most powerful person on earth. Dionysius heard the request and, with a thoughtful frown, asked Midas whether he really wanted it. On his confirmation, Dionysius granted the boon and vanished. Midas was in cloud nine at his achievement, and tested it out by touching a plant here and some flowers there and see them all turned into gold. Soon he became thirsty and took a glass of water to drink, only to see it turn into solid gold. He grabbed a fruit to eat and it turned into gold. In this somewhat confused state, he hugged his daughter who came along there, and she turned into a golden statue. It was only then his thoughtlessness in asking for this boon hit him like a ton of bricks. He immediately prayed to God Dionysius and asked him to take back his boon and return everything to normalcy. Dionysius of course knew what would happen and hence his initial hesitation in granting the boon. Obviously the Gods know what they are doing, and they put a twist in the tail.

Of course Hindu mythology has its quota of such boons and what sort of escape routes the Gods had provided to finally overcome them. Take the case of the demon king Hiranyakashipu. He had performed a severe penance and had earned the boon by which he will never be killed. The conditions were: he will not be killed by a human being or an animal; nor with any weapon; neither on the earth nor in the sky; neither inside the house nor outside; neither in daylight nor at night; and his blood should not be spilled on the ground. What a formidable list!! Well, finally after he had had his quota of time to throw his weight about and play havoc, God appeared in the form of Narasimha, with a human torso and lion’s head and claws, dragged the demon king to the doorstep between the house and outside, in the twilight period between day and night, placed him across His thighs, tore open his abdomen with His claws and drank all the blood without spilling a drop on the ground, thereby fulfilling all the conditions. The moral of the story: Don’t tangle with the Gods; they know how to twist you around their little fingers.

In Hindu mythology we believe that Goddess Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge and the arts and speech, gets into the tongue of the seeker and makes him/her say things slightly differently from what they intended to say, thereby getting a distorted boon. Demon King Ravana’s brother Kumbakarna performed a penance to earn a boon of permanent everlasting life or nithyathva. But at the right moment Saraswati stepped in and made him say he wanted Nidrathva, or a state of sleeping always. The boon was granted of course. Ever since, he was sleeping all the time. Even during the war between Rama and Ravana, Ravana’s men managed to wake him up with great difficulty and he came to the warfield, only to earn his permanent sleep.

All of this is a preamble to a story I recently heard. The ants all over the world got together in a massive rally to air their major grouse. When a snake or scorpion or some such creepy creature bites a human being, most often the human dies. But when an ant bites a human, the human does not die. This is a great injustice done to the ant community. So the ants resorted to mass prayer to Lord Shiva. Finally Shiva’s mount, Nandi, appeared before them and said Shiva was mightily pleased by their prayer, and was ready to grant their wish. They wanted to say that when they bit a human, “it should end in the human’s death”. Saraswati intervened at this point and they said “it should end in death”. Nandi said Thathaasthu (so be it) and vanished. So since then, when the ant bites, it ends in death – of the ant.

So, whenever anybody seeks a boon with ulterior motives, it ends up as a bane or curse for the seeker.

“God’s in His Heaven, and all’s right with the world” as P.G.Wodehouse used to say through Bertie Wooster.

Jai Gurudev