Every year the residents of Adugodi celebrate the festival of Piliagamma in the month of February. The menu of the day in all the homes is strictly non vegetarian.Since 3 years of being married into this part of the city, I have been an active part of the event without knowing the history behind the day. This year the curious cat in me awoke and questioned the very history of the day and the deity.
The tale goes thus
Another temple dedicated to Pilagamma is the Rajarajeshwari Pilagamma Temple
Many decades ago, Bangalore was not more than a modern village. Out of the many epidemics that existed then, Plague was considered most notorious. It would wipe out several villages and populations at an alarming rate. To ward off this evil, a new deity called Piliagamma came into existence. It was ritual that poultry and cattle would be sacrificed to the deity on this day, out of pure belief that medicines, hospitals and doctors or IEC activities were meager in comparison to Piliagamma. Even today when families narrate the old wives tales, deaths are recalled in every family owing to this epidemic.
Years down the line, when I narrate stories to my grand children, I wonder how absurd would it be to attribute deaths and injuries in the family or amidst friends and neighbors to weird incidents like terrorist attacks or an episode like Carlton towers or undermanaged sewage system which swells up in the rainy season.
One questions that bombards my mind frequently is
Why do we need terrorists to make us realize that our security system is lapse?
Why do we require a Carlton tower incident to happen to make us recognize that our safety system is not updated?
And most important of all
Why do we wait for the rainy season every year to remind the bureaucrats all the promises that were made a year ago or in the last poll?
I wonder, I just wonder….
