The 28th of February renowned as Science Day is an opportunity for every individual out there, believing in rational thoughts, to play a role in the fight against the baseless superstitions; those have been curbing the mental development of the citizens of the country since time immemorial.
We Indians, engrossed in our beliefs, very easily mix mythology with our daily activities. Nobody is proposing the abolition of mythological and religious beliefs, but what we do, should at least be solid enough to be presented to the world outside. It is sad that the current government in the centre is fully supporting the superstitious forces in our country, whereas a rationalist voice such as Narendra Dabholkar has been untimely silenced. People no longer remember with affection the birthday of our great scientists, but celebrate the birthday of every god man with pomp and grandeur. It has even come to the fore that many god man, who had been promoting themselves as the messengers of god have turned out to be frauds or rapists. Still, we are repeating the same age old faulty practice of dedicating our lives to their services and beliefs.
Taking some examples, it is funny that living in an age, where man has reached the moon, we still carry on useless activities based on superstitious beliefs on lunar eclipses. The lunar eclipses are nothing but a natural activity, every person who has gone through the school textbooks can know that, it by no means can be connected with a religious happening. People get frightened whenever a cat crosses their path fearing that something bad might happen, now in mathematics, it is a 50-50 chance that you will experience the cat crossing your path, there are numerous occasions when the moment after crossing someone’s path the cat got killed, so should that person be branded as “unlucky” and kept in a national museum?
Same is the case with the celebration of every festival in our diverse country; we no longer tend to go into a study regarding them but rather accept the generally known facts. This is the problem with youth of today, we cannot expect the elders who have passed their youth to delve into facts but we students can easily access the available resources , such a tendency to encourage science should be developed to curb the menaces that baseless superstition have brought upon us.
Events of witch murders are growing; there is a steep increase in the number of women hurt by being accused of practicing the dark arts with no study on the existence of any such thing. Scientists have proposed the idea of existence of dark matter though but it is still just an idea.
With such evils growing in the country, there has arrived a critical time when the scientific temper of every single individual of the country has to be developed, and the most important part of this movement has again been bestowed upon the most active section, the student community.
