Tehravi function in progress
Is it just me or does anyone else also find funeral functions a little too much?
I recently lost my grandfather and those thirteen days, the rituals were performed as per the Hindu customs. I personally believed that these rites of purity are nothing but an additional trouble to the already troubled family.
There is a ceremony called ‘tehravi’ or ‘shantibhoj’ where the relatives and people from whole village/town are fed. This ceremony seems completely out of place seeing the situation of the family. How can you expect a bereaved family to make arrangements of feeding hundreds (sometimes even thousands) of people
Apart from that sometimes these functions become a huge financial burden on the family of deceased, specially in backward villages of UP and Bihar where ceremonies like these define your love for the person who passed away. Often villagers take loans from the local moneylender further lowering their financial condition.
Moreover, it’s even a wastage of resources because these ceremonies don’t have a restricted entry and seeing this family makes more food than required. This food is then thrown away because once when this ceremony is over you can’t feed this food to anyone else.
Many believe that these functions give time to the family to move on, however I feel that they are nothing but a diversion because the real pain starts after these functions are over. The realisation starts after these ceremonies. This is the time when this you finally realise what just happened. This feeling finally sinks in as until now you were busy performing various rituals and then suddenly after thirteen days- BAM! You are all alone with nothing but memories of the dead person.
Sometimes these rituals are so binding, for example, in some villages of Bihar, ‘barsi(remembrance)’ is celebrated for five consecutive years and in those five years you can’t have any marriage, house warming or any happy function to respect the deceased. The people who already lack resources are forced to follow these rituals to save their grace.
Also I would like to tell that these thirteen days you are not allowed to leave your place which is quite difficult to follow seeing the fast moving world. Everyone has offices and jobs. World does not stop. But these function want you to stop.
These functions seemed very impractical to me. They do nothing except for increasing the pain of the family. Death is a very personal matter. Situations like this shouldn’t be guided by the society. Give family the freedom to be their own masters in such cases. Give them time to be stable. Anybody’s death is always a huge blow to the family, let them come out of it as per their convenience.
TheSvelteBird 