Ganesha on the Dashboard- A saddening but delightful read

“Ganesha on the Dashboard” by V.Raghunathan and M.A Eswaran caught my eyes in a book fair that promised a huge discount margin and a display of interesting works. The title was attention-grabbing enough and the reviews added to the appeal. And this piece of nonfiction having read, I found myself resonating to the DNA review, “A saddening but delightful book”. A curious paradox, one might wonder, but this makes up the gist of feelings one goes through on reading the book.

Published by Penguin books, the book is most reasonably priced at Rs.299 and is definitely worth the amount. The cover illustration by Joy Gosney is beautiful as well provides an insight into what the book is about. There had been some serious research done behind the work, and the book is provided with valuable footnotes and appendices.

The book is all about the extremes of absurd superstitions that we Indians delve into and the shocking lack of scientific temper of our country. A country that has spawned number of international scientific figures, isn't it a paradox that our country is also the one in which people dying of poverty and “stone idols being fed milk and fruits” coexist? Excerpting from a precis of the book,

“Take the way we go about buying a car. We identify an auspicious date and time, then proceed to break a coconut, plonk a plastic deity of Ganesha on the dashboard, and zoom off at a great speed, refusing to wear our seat belts.”

The book is one hundred percent accurate in describing the “incredible” Indian sensibility and is informative, quirky and at times funny. The several chapters devoting to the explanation of scientific temper and science vs. Superstitions are simply delightful to read about. Each chapter starts with a quotation and an interesting story or a tidbit about the chapter. To those who aren't much interested in science, don’t recoil. The book, unlike your deplorably uninteresting Physics textbooks, makes scientific facts sound interesting and once you've read the book, tadaa!  There you are, about five times enlightened than before. I managed to learn a lot about Kepler, Einstein and Roemer than from my discarded physics text books.

So, does the book go wrong somewhere? I guess the extremities of scientific arguments of the authors can prove a bit unsettling to the reader. The arguments for astrology being a pseudo science are acceptable but when the belief in “gods” is being questioned, I guess that’s where the ‘saddening’ part comes in. Science has made our life a lot better and the right perspective about science or the scientific temper is integral to a good future. But then,the age old battle of science vs. Religion creeps in. One major truth in our life is that no matter how tough we appear, we all hope for miracles secretly. Whether we see them true or not, hoping for miracles, praying, meditating, all this can make people happier. (Hormones responsible for this are called endorphins, again the science part.J)

So when we read that there is no point in praying, instead run to you makeshift labs, well! Belief in a supreme force, the knowledge that there is something to lean on, can be a motivation, a source of hope and is essential for a human being; false or otherwise. And so here it is- a book well worth reading, “saddening, but delightful”.