Did the Hindu god Ganesha really drink milk in thousands of temples on this day many years ago?
I can never forget what I saw on that twenty-first day of September when I reached the temple nearest to my home. It changed my whole outlook toward God, life and people in general.
I had paddled fast on my bicycle on that slightly nippy morning and, leaving the bike unlocked against the temple wall, I rushed inside. I had to jostle my way through a motley crowd of devotees to reach the inner sanctum, where Lord Ganesha’s stone sculpture was affixed amongst several other Hindu deities. The idol was thronged on all sides by devotees, who were all falling over themselves to offer spoonfuls of milk to Ganesha.
In Hindu rituals, Lord Ganesha is usually offered a laddoo, a round sweet made of gram flour, but on that particular day of 1995, news had spread that Ganesha was “accepting” milk. On normal days, the faithful would put a laddoo to Ganesha’s mouth and then place it at His feet or in a tray nearby. This act of offering is essentially symbolic and a portion of the sweet remains stuck to the idol’s mouth. But that day, people claimed that Ganesha’s idols everywhere were literally drinking the milk offered to them, spoon by spoon. Within a few hours, the phenomenon was being hailed as a miracle in modern times.
It was this miracle that I had come to witness. I got up a little late that day, and as I was rubbing the early morning sleep out of my eyes, my overly credulous and religious mother told me that Lord Ganesha was drinking milk in temples everywhere and I must go and offer some to the Elephant God.
I was not exactly irreligious but, in my haste to see the impossible happen right before my eyes, I had rushed out of the house without carrying any milk to offer.
Now, as I stood inside the temple, agape, and watched the throng near Ganesha’s idol, I just could not believe it.
Not the miracle but what I really saw.
People were actually tilting their spoons, cups and other dishes full of milk they had brought with them at the stone idol – and the milk that was supposed to be sipped by the deity was spilling down its body and away into the drain that led out of the temple and mingled into the bigger culvert outside.
All of these religious people had come running to the temple hearing that Ganesha was drinking milk, and all without exception were actually pouring milk at the idol. They did it one after the other in quick succession, without stopping for a moment to look at what happened to the milk. Their already devout beliefs needed no confirmation – the idol was indeed drinking milk as far as they were concerned.
I carefully looked at several more acts of milk-offering, hoping to see Ganesha take a single sip of the white liquid - if only to help me form my own faith in miracles. But my eyes saw the same thing over and over again: milk trickling down the sides of the idol without so much as a hint of acceptance by the deity. I even dared to ask the person standing next to me, “Don’t you think these guys are spilling milk instead of feeding it to the idol?” But he only chided me for being an atheist and for making such a sacrilegious comment. “You shouldn’t doubt this miracle, or the gods will punish you. If you can’t offer any milk, at least don’t poison other people’s faith!” he retorted.
With a heavy heart I walked back home, my bicycle beside me. But I kept thinking: How could it be? How could it be? Was I shorn of any devotion whatsoever, that I couldn’t see the miracle? Or were people so blinded by their faith that they could not see what was obvious to me?
By late evening that day, the “news” of the “miracle” was breaking on all TV channels and other media. Not just temples in Delhi and across India, but many places of Hindu worship in several countries of the world, including Britain, Canada and Dubai, reported the same phenomenon being replicated.
Some novice reporters even got carried away by the spectacle and, in addition to the reports they filed, made their own offerings to Lord Ganesha right there on live television – and came away “believers” themselves. At the same time, there were some channels that had rounded up a bunch of rationalists in their studios and were putting up questions to them, demanding either plausible explanations or asking them to surrender their rationality to the televised images of the miracle beaming alongside their somber visages.
I watched as many programs as I could. Among other explanations given by the scientifically inclined, I remember hearing “capillary action and surface tension” as being responsible for milk getting slightly sucked out of the spoon before making its way down the idol in minute trickles. The tiny streams of milk down the idols went mostly unnoticed. Or it didn’t matter to those who had already decided to believe in the miracle.
As for me, I wasn’t really looking for explanations, for I had seen the truth behind the miracle with my own eyes. But it really amazed me how millions of people across the world came to believe in it in such a short time – and that they still carried on with their belief even after many scientists repeated the “miracle” in a laboratory setting, offering their explanations in layman’s terms.
Like I said earlier, not that I was completely irreligious, but from that day on, I vowed not to be blind in my faith. Whenever any other news of such miracles appeared (and many times it did, in fact), my mind played out the images of people spilling milk at Ganesha’s idols as if in a movie flashback – and my sense of reason prevailed over mass mirage.
Today, 16 years on after the incident, my own spirituality and religious beliefs have gone through tremendous changes – and perhaps will continue to evolve till my last moment. But that single incident taught me more about mass hysteria, herd mentality and blind faith than any volumes of literature could. It also acquainted me with the power of telecommunication and electronic media – and what it could wreak together with a little rumor let loose.
Looking back to that incident, I’ve often tried to make sense of many other widely believed miracles – often dating back to times when there was no television or photography. I’ve also tried to make sense of people’s own experiences with worship and prayer and with bringing their loved ones back from the clutches of terminal illness through their religious leanings, especially after the world’s best doctors had given up on them.
Can these personal experiences be called the real miracles? Did Moses really part the sea? Did Jesus Christ really rise from the grave? Did Savitri (in Hindu legend) brought her husband back to life on the strength of her love and devotion to him? Did scores of holy men and women who are said to have healed thousands through their touch over the centuries really perform miracles?
Then what of those whose heartfelt prayers go unanswered and their loved ones are lost forever? What about those who die in a stampede or burn alive in a fire at the very place where they have come to worship God (irrespective of whose God it is)?
And then I look at the mess in the world surrounding us – global warming, terrorism, religious fanaticism, food crisis…and think again: Can anything other than a miracle save us from hurtling toward a collective catastrophe?!
Will somebody perform that miracle? Till when will he or she wait?
The questions keep flooding my mind until they form a deluge and I have to set them aboard an ark so they could float away for a while and allow me to breathe.
Meanwhile, my own search for true spirituality – with or without miracles – goes on…
