BANGALORE
I was doing a half-sprint, half-brisk walk on Brunton Road this Wednesday when I was stopped in my tracks by an old lady.
I was doing a half-sprint, half-brisk walk on Brunton Road this Wednesday when I was stopped in my tracks by an old lady. Her wrinkles suggested she must be over 70. She was wearing a green Kanjeevaram silk sari and was carrying a hand-knit basket. Big gold earrings tugged at her ears and a rectangular diamond nose ring sparkled in the sunlight.
"Hindi?" she asked.
"Kannada?" I said, assuming she looked very South Indian and surely must be from around here.
"Hindi," she decided and started to speak in a smattering of broken Hindi.
She told me she came to the city with her son from Tumkur to get medical treatment at Ramaiah Hospital. While at the hospital, her son left and never returned.
"I waited for many days. Then I searched all over for him," she said.
"Didn't you go to the police? They might help you find him," I said.
She was outraged. "Didn't you hear what I just said? He's my son." The old lady then showered me with curses. She wanted money to go back to Vijayawada.
I calmed her down and offered to give her the phone number of an agency which deals with such cases. She refused. All she wanted was money.
"I can't give you money. But I can surely help you," I said.
She was angry again. This time, she cursed me even louder.
These were the choicest of abuses, I could tell, by the rage in her eyes and the intensity with which she was yelling out those words at me.
I took a few steps back, decided there was no point in talking to her.
As I walked away, I was chuckling to myself at the way the old lady had cursed me. But another part of me was also wondering what value those curses actually had in the cosmos. If there is a school of thought that believes sending out positive thoughts into the universe will bring about a positive outcome, shouldn't the opposite be true as well?
Should I take her curses seriously, I wondered. On the surface, cursing may be dismissed as a funny phenomenon, but it does conjure up deep-seated feelings.
"The strange emotional power of swearing as well as the presence of linguistic taboos in all cultures suggests that taboo words tap into deep and ancient parts of the brain," writes Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, in the book The Stuff of Thought.
So are the old lady's curses going to hurt me? Spiritual coach Jason Nelson says it will if I let it. "Think curses, and we imagine witches gathered around a pot of boiling brew casting spells to do harm. Take away the melodramatic ceremonies and you are left with simple intention. You create your own experience, no other does for you."
I got my answer. It's best to laugh the curses off and send the old lady some positive thoughts.
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