Rituals for the Dead

If you are unfamiliar with the Indian rituals for the dead (specifically the Hindus, but other religions have jumped into the bandwagon in recent times) you will find this informative. If you are familiar with the rituals then you might find this either amusing or disgusting. If you are one of those prudes with a hemorrhoid who thinks making fun of traditions or death is wrong, I suggest you click here.

Description of the dead:
A person who forgot to breathe for an extended period of time.

Lay out of the dead person’s earthly remains and surroundings:
The dead body is placed in the living (pun intended) room with the relatives of the dead surrounding it. The wails are punctuated with a brief episode of silence before someone else takes up the wailing. The place is filled with enough smoke (ritual burning of incense sticks) to give an inferiority complex to a pub on a Saturday night. The decibel level of the wails is indirectly proportional to the wealth left behind by the dead person.

Accepted conversations around the dead:
There are specific things that fall under the category of “accepted topics of conversation” in a dead mans house. Talk about what a good man he was. He could have been a homicidal psychotic maniac who killed the bishop, but that is forgotten during the funeral. (I wonder what would have been said during Hitler’s funeral if there was one. “Here lies a good man, who killed six million Jews and two million other assorted fellow beings. He believed in the supremacy of the Aryan race, he lived and died a man good at heart, unfortunately he misplaced his heart on the day he attained puberty and never found it till the end”)??

Rituals of the dead:
The dead person is laid out on a mat with a ‘One rupee’ coin stuck on his forehead. Probably to buy a ticket on the bus to wherever he is going, heaven or hell costs the same I guess. (This one rupee ritual might have originated from the ancient Greek tradition of covering the dead persons eyes with coins, which is used to pay the boatman Charon, who takes the dead person across the mythical river Styx to the land of the dead. No coin, no ride, the dead man is left in a limbo, haunting old castles instead of either rotting in hell or living it up in heaven.)
He is then taken on a ceremonial tour to the crematorium. This is where the fun begins. Amateur dancers dead drunk on cheap liquor escort the ceremonial tour. As they have enough liquor in them to be hired out as a brewery, they act crazier than is normal for humans. The path to the crematorium or cemetery is converted into “The strip”. Firecrackers, flash bangs, mad dances, drunken screams, floral displays, it makes one think that the whole family has been eagerly waiting for this guy to kick the proverbial bucket. Once he decided to oblige them, the joy overflows and celebrations are unleashed with an urgency that would have made the dead man proud to be dead.

The Crematorium or burial ground:
Spooky songs belted out on high quality loudspeakers and drunken ‘funeral directors’. (I use that term loosely.) Hindu rituals say that the people accompanying the cortege have to put rice over the dead mans mouth besides sticking more coins on the forehead. When the funeral directors see the coins being brought out, a fight usually erupts amongst them as to who gets the coins. Sometimes it turns violent, and the whole thing takes on a surreal tinge.
A bunch of half naked graveyard workers fighting on the sidelines, big speakers with spooky songs, a slight drizzle, stray dogs all around chewing on big bones (big bones in a crematorium would certainly be the femur of someone’s grand mother). Human bodies being burnt all around, the smell of burning flesh, the ash flying like mist in a mountain. A nasty old crone mumbling to herself and digging through the ashes of bodies already burnt hoping to find a coin that others had missed. The laments for the dead in DTS surround sound. Thank heavens I wont be there for my funeral.


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