Today is the first day of Kartika month. It starts the day after Diwali. When growing up, we had a tradition of waking up before sun rise during this month, taking shower, praying to lord Shiva, lighting a diya (lighting diyas was considered very auspicious during this month) and reading Kartika Puranam. It consists of 30 stories, 1 story per day through out the month. Depending on weather it is a Monday or a pournima, or a dwadasi, or ekadasi we have to fast.
Indian festivals and auspicious months are designed with great thought. Kartika Month follows after Dassera and Diwali. These festivals running 10 days and 5 days long respectively are filled with eating lot of desserts, fried foods, with friends and family. Come Karthika month you fast to get rid of all those extra weight gain. Very smartly embedded into culture to keep a person fit :)
My mom is very devotional and religious. She used to perform lot of vratas, poojas regularly. So I am used to doing it with her but I am very analytical and logical person and I always have lot of questions and comments on the stories that I used to read, the reasons the vratas needed to be performed etc... I stopped reading those stories after I got married as Rajesh is not too much into all these and obviously I found an excuse to give up on all the things I learnt while growing up :)
I did pick them up once in a while in between but never stuck to them as time and again I did not see a point. This year, I want to read Karthika Puranam again and analyze the stories one day at a time and hot down my findings to see how my thought process changes with time. Recently I read about a study made in Scotland following a focus group for 65 years of their life time and it proves that our personalities completely change from when we were young to when we become 65-80 years old. I want to conduct that study on myself and see how I have changed. I do journal things often and I have notes to refer to :)
