Touchy touch

Touchy touch!

Touchy = oversensitive; irascible
Irascible = susceptible of ire or anger.

“Touch-me-not” is the name of a weed, which is also very slowly facing extinction.
Children enjoy touching it, since its leaves instantly fade and close down for a while!

This ‘touch’, has been looked at by people since ancient times.

It is interesting to take a look at some of the situations involving touch.

Some people are very sensitive to touch. Tickle them under armpit and they jump with a forced laughter.
Children play that ‘touch’ and ‘you are out’. In that ‘Kabbadi’, touch and cross over the line back, the touched player is out.

The list is endless, and suffice it to close here with the latest,
“Touch Screen”


The ancient touch theory is what has turned very very ‘touchy’ of late!
The reason seems quite simple.
They have suggested a lot many of conscious ‘touches’ and they all seem to ‘elude’ our meaningful perception!
These touches have faded out. Not just the touches, the very ‘files attached’ got obliterated!

Like to take a look at few of them?

During that daily ritual after a thread ceremony, the touches with specified fingers are notoriously complex!
When somebody is famished, it is hardly the time to touch singular grains with cumbersome combination of fingers, mutter something (mercifully nobody notices), and swallow it!
The spouse is to touch the husband’s shoulder blade with a grass blade, (they are very fussy about the correct ends, as if they are verily negative or positive live wires with a DC current!).
The sacred thread for the holy knot during wedding is to be ‘touched’ by elders all around, just before the ‘big moment’!
The offering to deity is touched by devotees, before it is offered.

And so on….
How long do we continue with these meaningless touches?
Well slowly it has to fade out.
Meaningless, outdated, irrelevant provisions of any enactment is struck off!
Here, the problem is, there is no majority vote stipulated, needed to ‘deal’ with it.
Whether fortunately or unfortunately, Hinduism is indeed a way of life, and not a religion, to be rigorously enforced upon any body!

Then the obviously logical, but a bit subtle rule that we try to follow, before we try to do away with such touchy touches (and why just touches, even untouchable provisions like 3-day ordeals too) seems to read as :

Any way, these practices are fading out quite fast. Choices have already been made. The purposes of ‘taking a re-look’ seem to go no farther than ensuring that we do not confront any social exclusion, due to any inadvertent, unforeseen reasons like a cluster-cloud effect or so!

Tail piece: (perhaps that is why the thread renewal programme is the isolated ritual that continues to attract maximum numbers for that ‘muster-roll-signing’!

What ever the bulk majority of people do, the essence of spiritual traditions are not and have never been at the mercy of ‘present generation’ at any point of ‘time’!
Somewhere somebody gets helplessly pushed into spirituality, and the whole of the text lays bare before such person in the eternal ‘web’ to just read it, eyes closed!

( For instance, somebody closely known to me is already on the job. He has dug out some touch system, where touching the tips of fingers of same palm for sometime, has given that person immense benefits for acute & chronic ailments! He told me it is some ‘Mudra-vigyan’ or so! And he knows it will not stop at the superficial layer of stupid cures! It would take him literally “places” (!) , reminding him perhaps of that “nadi” quack who can feel the life energy and not just the pulse with a mere touch!)

Now, you agree, I had to lay bare, the ‘touchy’ aspect of it all, “once and for all”!

Psn(16-7-2008)