My parent’s first house in Vellore was next to the Mental Health Center (Department of Psychiatry) of CMC. Right next to my house was a hotel which was mostly occupied by patients and their relatives. Since the hotel also belonged to the owner of the house, the caretakers would often call my parents in case any of the guests needed help. And so, my parents helped a few of them – mostly in the form of a listening ear and a prayer.
During one weekend when I was at home, I heard a child wailing in the hotel. It went on for almost an hour. I get irritated when parents are not able to get their kids to stop crying. Even with tantrums, I don’t think a child would cry for more than a few minutes. Thoroughly irritated, I asked my mother to go and take a look.
My mum is an expert in dealing with kids. So, I was pretty sure that the wailing would immediately stop and the parents would get a chide. After an hour, my mum came back home and most surprisingly, the child was still wailing. It seems that the child had a problem. The child just wailed on and on forever, night and day, day after day and for weeks together. Desperate for a cure, the parents brought the child to the MHC.
Say the parents of the child met a holy man who offered to do a puja that would cure the child. And by some unexplained reason, the child stops wailing. Do you know of any reason why the parents should not believe in the sadhu? What would rationality or logic mean to them? Would medical science or the scientific method make sense? Would they even care what “confirmation bias” or “post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy” is?
I know of a mother who prays daily for her son who has a congenital condition. The condition is non fatal but the son would not be able to lead a normal life. The son, who is one of those rational types, was disgusted with his mum for this. They argued almost every time the son went home for the weekend. “She is a mother”, the father would say to the son, pleading with him to stop arguing. But the son would go off on a rant on genetics, DNA and other blah blah and how if anything could have been done, it should have been when he was a single cell.
My parents moved to a different house. I never heard about the child again. But I hope (yeah, the most irrational thing ever) that things turned out for the better. Last heard, the son has become wiser and has stopped arguing with his mum.
“She is a mother”. Rationality does not apply here. Only love.
