Priests offer holy offering through mouth-to-mouth contact

Coimbatore: Hundreds of devotees participated in the seven-day-long Karamadai Sri Ranganathar Temple Masi Magam Car Festival in Coimbatore.

Buzz up!The festival culminated with a temple procession in a village at Karamadai on Sunday, in which the priests offered prasadam (holy offering) to the devotees through mouth-to-mouth contact.

People in the outskirts of Coimbatore still practice this tradition and believe in the superstition that if the priest, who is considered as god's messenger, puts prasadam in their mouth through his mouth then the childless women conceive soon and all their family problems disappear. Read More................Coimbatore priests offer holy offering through mouth-to-mouth contact

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Priests 'purify' Temple after Minister's visit

BHUBANESWAR: An Orissa minister has learnt the hard way that she can win popular mandates and earn her way into the Cabinet but can’t shake off her outcaste tag.
Read full story here at TOI................Priests 'purify' Orissa temple after Dalit minister's visit

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Indonesians thrown out of Indian temple

Five Hindu pilgrims from Indonesia were thrown out of the Jagannath temple by priests on Friday despite the presence of a police escort accompanying the foreigners. Read more..............Indonesians thrown out of Puri temple

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Priests in short supply

Hindus in parts of northern India are finding it difficult to find priests to perform yearly rituals for the dead.

Priests/Pandits in Agra, Mathura and neighbouring districts of Uttar Pradesh are working overtime because of the huge number of people who perform the annual ritual of feeding their ancestors during 'Pitr Paksh Shradh', a fortnight when people pay their respects to the dead.

"On occasions we have to eat at three different places with hardly a gap of one hour," says Pandit Mahesh Shukla, whose family specialises in performing rituals for the dead............Read more........Priests in short supply in Shradh season

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Priests preferred to Doctors for cure

Here are tribal people of Arunachal Pradesh state in India who still believe in community priests rather than medical practitioners to cure diseases.

Close to half of the 1.1 million population of the state, bordering Tibet and Myanmar, are either animists or believers of a primitive faith called Donyi Polo whose followers worship the sun and moon gods.

Lui Sena had been running a high fever accompanied by a splitting headache for the past 10 days. After herbal remedies and a visit to a doctor failed to cure the eight-year-old boy, Sena's parents carried him in a makeshift stretcher made of bamboo staves to 72-year-old Dera Topu, the village priest.

Squatted on the wooden floor of his stilted bamboo and straw hut, Topu was engrossed in prayers with his eyes closed and hands folded. The priest chanted hymns and fanned Sena with a multi-coloured hornbill feather.

"This boy is haunted by evil spirits and now I have to ward off the spirit. No medicines or doctors could cure the boy. You did the right thing by coming to me," the priest told Sena's parents.

An hour later, the little boy said he was feeling comfortable.

Isn't it strange that in this "Scientific, 21st century world", still there are people who believe in all such weird practices!!!!

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