WHEN he was considered a sage and his criminal links were not common knowledge an Indian godman made the mistake of telling a journalist, when she interviewed him for a magazine, that her first child would be a boy.

“But swamiji, I already have two lovely daughters and don’t have the budget for a third, never mind male or female,” he was told. Remember that the Indian cultural pantheon, with its keen if overzealous business sense, sees a male child as a great boon with market value. The quest plays a hand in the high national average of female foeticide and bride-burning.

Meera Nanda, a philosopher of science based in the US, too was exasperated when she saw the market overwhelming old folksy traditions, including religion, of her childhood. Nanda was greeted on arrival in Chandigarh by a nephew who brought his first new car to take her home. In an article in the Economic and Political Weekly last week, she described how the nephew had bedecked the car with red ribbons, a garland of fresh marigolds strung around the number plates. The top of the front window had two swastikas and an ‘Om’ painted on it in a new Hindu ritual invented to bless new vehicles that are clogging India’s roads.

It was a special car, so the nephew took it to a temple where he shelled out a tidy amount for the puja, instead of getting a free ceremony, which his dealership had offered as a part of the incentive package. Car dealers offering free pujas? Nanda was in for further shocks. She discovered that the custom of vaahan puja, literally vehicle worship, had spread to the four corners of India as prosperity came with economic reforms.

Given the rage that vaahan pujas had become, innovative car dealers began to throw in free pujas for their customers. Full-time pujaris were hired to do the required rituals — breaking a coconut, making you drive over limes to ward off evil spirits or reciting Sanskrit mantras. They would give the customers sacred prasad to take home, or capture the ceremony in digital pictures that could be emailed by the customers to friends and relatives.

Economic prosperity in India is a boon from high above, quite unrelated it seems to the toil and planning that goes into it elsewhere. While Indians revel in gadgets and creature comforts created by a materialistic and rational understanding of nature, many seem to experience the world as if it is literally crawling with gods who have the power of life and death over our lives.

Being a rationalist Nanda leaned on Richard Dawkins for explanation. He observed that people generally “persistently hold this false belief that the reality we inhabit contains a supernatural agent who designed the universe, maintains it and intervenes in it with miracles, which are temporary violations of his own otherwise immutable laws”. With their pujas they beseech this supernatural agent to guard them. Puja is the premium they eagerly pay for the divine insurance against mishaps and accidents.

Of course every religion subscribes to the mumbo-jumbo of talismans and endless petitions for boon. In India the symptoms are growing with the prosperity of its middle classes. Indians, for example, have celebrated Diwali, in different ways for different reasons. It is observed as the country’s festival of lights and it also continues to herald the Samvat New Year (which began in 57 BC, way before Hinduism mutated from Arya Dharma and acquired its current name). Traders and moneylenders update their account books on Diwali when Laxmi, the goddess of wealth, is worshipped.

Oil lamps guide her to their homes. The poor obviously didn’t put enough oil in their lamps. Southern India has different lore for Diwali as it has for other religious and cultural festivals.

In the current season of economic distress Diwali was largely subdued as shopping malls registered a drop in footfalls. However, by the evening of Tuesday the intensity of firecrackers picked up as news came in of a significant recovery at the Bombay Stock Exchange. Goddess Laxmi had smiled on the decimated fortunes of a few million punters. Or had she? In the era of globalisation the overworked goddess had to begin her journey by granting a boon to Wall Street first, then to East Asia before bringing cheer to India’s shareholders. That’s how it works.

It’s not easy to shake off old myths at the best of times, but with relative prosperity fuelling given beliefs, the task becomes even more formidable. A lot many believe that firecrackers and sparklers that embellish the festival Diwali are part of a historical tradition. They are convinced that Lord Rama, who returned home to Ayodhya on this day after defeating Lanka’s mythical ruler Ravana, was greeted with firecrackers and phooljharis, the glowing sparklers, made with combustible powder.

With new technology, this myth was shored up by cinema. According to the movie version, Rama’s army wins by using an amazing array of ignited missiles. More recently, TV channels have been doing the job well, disseminating notions of legends, old and freshly cooked up, that pass for history. Fortunately, a successful campaign against firecrackers, led by more rationally endowed environmentalists and schoolchildren, has substantially lowered the noise and air pollution that came with Diwali.

I had written recently that Mughal emperor Babar had brought gunpowder to India. His use of cannons for the first time in Indian warfare was instrumental in the rout of Delhi’s Pathan ruler Ibrahim Lodhi 482 years ago. But a reader differs with this version. Parshu Narayanan of Gurgaon, evidently a history buff, says Babar was not the first to use cannons in India.

The Portuguese had arrived in the south 30 years before Babar and both Deccani sultans and Vijayanagar Nayaks used Portuguese gunners much before Babar arrived at Panipat. That’s a reasonably credible insight. Remember how we were taught political geography in school? In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue! In 1498 da Gama knocked at India’s gate!

The reviled Christian missionary schools taught us the Bible, but they also gave us a rational view of history. We were thus taught how Taoist alchemists searching for an elixir of immortality accidentally discovered gunpowder in China in the 9th century. Its discovery followed centuries of experiments by Taoists to attain immortality.

Common knowledge has it that the Arabs acquired knowledge of gunpowder some time after 1240. But who cares for history in an era of rapidly evolving myths. Let’s get real so to speak. But even here, as irony would have it, the sparklers, the firecrackers, even the lamps to greet Lord Rama on Diwali are imported from China. The only variable in this equation is the fluctuating exchange rate.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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