Ayudha Puja

Various subcultures in India have various Gods to invoke in order to take care of all things dealing with machines. In the north and east people celebrate Vishwakarma Puja. In the South, especially in Karnataka, folks perform the Ayudha Puja.

When I bought my car in 2003 I also hired a driver with it. I didn't want to swear a lot before starting out with work on a regular basis. Come Dusshera he insisted that I take our car to the temple and get it sanitised just so that evil stays out of the way. I reluctantly followed his advice that year and the next year and the next. However, over the three years my driver caused about 5 minor and 3 major accidents mostly by violating basic road rules like forgetting about the concept of right of way. Fixing these caused my insurance rate to go up and I had to incur a lot of out of pocket expenses too. Its not that I did not cause any accidents - these incidents (if you will), however, did not cause my purse as much harm.

Here's what I'd like to propose. Since the RTO officials are not ready to do their job properly and give licenses only to those who know how to drive I think its time for the Gods to take over. Every time someone takes his car to the temple to get Ayudha puja done I propose that the priest baptising the car ask the driver 10 questions about prevalent road rules and if he is not able to answer atleast 6 of them correctly the priest should dissuade God from blessing the car and the driver. We shouldn't mix religion and politics but hell no one said we can't mix religion and policies.