The Curious Case of Hair Sacrifice (Mundan) Part-I

Sastang Dandavat at your Lotus feet Swamiji.

Not long ago, I had a ridiculous idea about hair sacrifice. I often used to think that people visit temples and offer their hair to the deity / divine! Does it really make any sense at all. Is this the best we can offer or are we miser enough to get rid of the hair and call it an offering to the ‘Divine’? Does the supreme really require our ‘hair’? Is the almighty really pleased with this type of ‘offering’? Is it really worth calling a ‘sacrifice’ or ‘offering’?

But as I grew a bit more in terms of spirituality, I developed different perspective. As I have already revealed in the past that, I do not live a lavish (can the definition really fit?) life and till date I have never gone to any Hair Cutting Parlor which charges more than Rs. 150 (as on date, without inflation adjustment). So you can practically tell that I have never visited any Hair Cutting Parlor. Yes, I go to Biloo Barber’s shop and get the cutting done. The shaving part, I do it at home with my Gillette Mach-III. It is as simple as that. But of late I am studying about different business and their models and I came to know a really interesting fact.

People really give importance on their looks and are willing to pay a fortune or at least a substantial amount for grooming them. May be, as I never gave much importance to looks, no daughter landed up in our house. ‘Sahil’ and ‘Samil’ appeared instead of ‘Saloni’ and ‘Sejal’. Yes, we had fixed ‘Sahil’ and ‘Saloni’ when expecting the first child. Similarly, we had fixed ‘Sejal’ and ‘Samil’ when expecting the second one! Anyway, the point is people in general do stress on the looks and by looks, I don’t mean that ‘minimum look’. The level has been raised over the period. I am not saying this, Stats reveal the fact.

So now the point of ‘hair sacrifice’ comes into picture. People love their hair a lot more than I expected! Actually the fault is with my wife Sanghamitra also for the underestimation! She is also not a fan of grooming and make up which made me generalize the notion about ‘hair industry’ until recently. But the industry is significant and I am not even talking about export of ‘hair’. That is a totally different ball game.

One of my office mates, got hair transplantation at an astronomical cost to gain self-confidence and develop a good ‘Market Cap’ in the ‘Groom Market’ 😉  Numerous others have been spending hefty amount in retaining and maintaining their hair. One white hair and the entire set of precautionary measures are deployed. I think, after a few days, some start ups will appear offering ‘hair insurance’. And if any entrepreneur is taking the idea from this blog, please do remit my part of the royalty honestly after becoming an Unicorn!

Several movies like ‘Bala’, ‘Gone Kesh’ and very recently ‘Good Bye’ have shown the importance of hair. In the movie ‘Good Bye’ the protagonist refuses to have ‘mundan’ after his mother’s demise because he had to attend a Board Meeting and could not afford a total bald look! Though he had a ‘Hriday-Parivartan’ afterwards and got the ritual done, people care a lot about their hair. And they are not instantly ready to let them go within 5 minutes of clean shaving! Hence, the conclusion is ‘hair offering’ is really a sacrifice! This may not be the Spiritual reason, but it is definitely a case of one’s love for one’s looks. Now it has made sense to me, I mean the ‘mundan’ as a form of ‘offering’.

Try to imagine yourself without hair for a moment, you probably won’t look that nice from materialistic point of view unless you are Swamiji. Swamiji looks divine in his form both from materialistic (physical appearance) and spiritual point of view. At least to me, he looks much more attractive than his Poorvashram look.

And the ‘hair offering’ experience got a heavy boost when we went for Samil’s ‘mundan’. In Odisha, it is a ritual to offer the first hair of a baby to deity (ishta) after the baby completes one year. So to complete the ritual, we went to a very famous temple which has been revamped recently called ‘Yadagirigutta Lakshmi-Narsimha Swami’ temple. This is being developed by the Telangana Govt. to match with ‘Tirupati Balaji’ temple as during the bifurcation of the state, Tirupati temple remained in Andhra Pradesh at least Geographically.

Are you interested to read more about how things conspired? What happened during the ‘mundan’ journey, how I realised more about ‘Is it a good News or a bad news’ finally culminating on ‘we do not know yet’, how we saw very clear indication of Samil’s connection with Swamiji and what magic unfolded in front of us after Samil’s ‘hair sacrifice’?

If the answer is ‘yes’ please let me know in the comment section.

Jai Shri Hari.

To be continued…