Jhoot boley kauwa kaate

Duty of the son: Shraddh must be performed with faith, devotion and reverence. According to Hindu scriptures, a son who does not perform Shraddh for his ancestors is an ungrateful son. The scriptures condemn such a person to a life of misery and poverty.
(Quoted from nyaw).

According to the scriptures you have to perform rituals on the 10th day after a person dies. One of the rituals is to make offerings of rice cakes to the crows.

R: Why crows?
F: Crows serve as an instant messaging system between the dead and the living.

R: Whoa, whoa, whoa. How would you know that?
F: Everybody knows that. Here, I even made a neat little diagram to show how it works.



F: In the first drawing you have a dead guy and his soul flying up in the air. Then the soul communicates its last wishes to the crow (indicated as blah).

R: And why would the soul communicate with a crow instead of a human?
F: Humans can be very conniving and distort the message from the dead to their own advantage.
R: Good point.

F: Okay so the soul communicates its wishes to Mr. Crow.
R: Wait are those red undies that the crow is wearing?
F: Yes. Since he has psychic superpowers it is only fitting that he be deemed a superhero, hence the undies.
R: Nice touch.

F: Thank you. So once the message is relayed, the crow goes to the dead person’s house and waits for the humans to make the rice offerings. The crow does not immediately touch the rice cakes once the offerings are made. It waits for the human to utter the magic words (a.k.a. promises to fulfill dead man’s wish). The crow then pecks on the rice cake designated to the dead person.
R: Ri-ight.
F: You don’t seem convinced.
R: Well I was just wondering if there were any controls to validate this hypothesis.
F: The crow pecked on the rice cake assigned to the dead guy. How do you explain that?
R: Coincidence?
F: You skeptics are never satisfied.
R: I would be if you show me some controls and statistical significance.
F: What?
R: We should do some experiment. Enroll some volunteers. When they die, we put 100 rice cakes with one assigned to a dead guy. The crow has inside information so it should be able to pick the right rice cake. Then to validate the result, we run this test some 10-20 times. What do you think?
F: Science is limited by its tools. You can’t understand the supernatural by conducting scientific experiments. Besides, there must have been some good reasons for our ancestors to follow such practices. Our ancestors have come up with rituals after a lot of contemplation and deep thinking.
R: Science was never meant for answering all the questions. But it certainly can answer some of the questions. It shouldn’t be difficult to test the crow’s superpowers. As far as our ancestors go, they also believed the earth was flat and the sun revolved around the earth. They were limited by their technology or the lack of it. I would not discredit all the rituals. For example, the Egyptians had been using copper vessels to store water decades before they understood how copper helped in keeping the water pure. Now we know that copper has antimicrobial properties. However, I want to reason with the traditions and not follow them blindly.
F: Suit yourself.