I am listening with half a ear right now to the news on tv. There is a report on Abishek's engagement to Ash, which is of course accompanied by the whole hullaballoo about Ash being "manglik". There have been a lot of "upay" or "workarounds" suggested to get over the bad influence of Mangal or Mars over the horroscope of the girl, including getting her symbolically married to a tree!
The general idea that everyone has of the "Manglik dosha" (don't ask me what exactly it means in terms of the horroscope, just that it involves some sinister positioning of Mars) is from weird Hindi movies where a Manglik girl gets married and then a lot of misfortune befalls her new family and so on. People never really tell you what exactly is the matter with a Manglik girl, and why people say that it is likely her husband will die. But I discovered something very interesting a few years ago about this matter.
My dad has a very good friend, who shares his interest in astrology and in fact practices it beyond the amateur interest that my dad shows in it. So one fine afternoon when these two buddies had their charts and papers strewn about and were discussing horroscopes (mine, of course) I overheard my dad asking this gentleman what being Manglik means. The gentleman assured him that is wansn't anything to worry about and generally people with the Manglik dosha have very strong sexual desires, and that is why it is recommended that they should be married to another Manglik. I suppose you can imagine what I thought about that? Well I rushed to share this news with my cousin who used to live with us, and who is also a Manglik. We sometimes still giggle about having a high enough sex drive to kill a guy from exhaustion.
Anyway both she and I got married in circumstances where our parents were not able to match our horroscopes with the guy's so I will never know if my SO is Manglik or not. But for the time being he seems to be coping well under the pressure, so to speak; in fact he seems to be positively thriving.
Of course, if you have read anything of my blog before, you will know that I do not believe a word of what horrscopes are supposed to reveal to us, and so it is all irrelevant to me. But it is sad to see that people let their entire lives be ruled by these ancient systems which have ceased to have any meaning in today's world, if they ever had any. Here you can read some interesting facts and workarounds for the Manglik Dosha. Of course, if you read this, you will know that it is all a money-making enterprise, (yep, you can pay by credit card or via direct debit from the major banks!) whether it involves buying charms or getting pujas and yagyas done to reduce the Martian terror or paying a pundit to get your daughter married to a tree!
ETA: Apparently my blog has been getting loads of hits since I wrote this post, because of the typo: "Abishek". So I won't correct it, but I will add the correct spelling "Abhishek" here too, so that I don't miss out on people Googling the correct spelling!
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