A peep into the world of ghosts!

Rrg · Jun 25, 2009

Dear All,
Greetings!
I am a new member to this forum.
I came across this interesting post couple of days back.
Congrats!
rrg

ojaantrik · Jul 11, 2009

Dear Cheeniya:

Don't be too scared to bump into this comment, though I won't blame you if you react the way your grandma did when she located the apparition in the ceiling. In my opinion, you had been somewhat unfair to her, since I have every reason to believe that THEY exist. If you don't see them, the fault clearly lies with your eyesight, or point of view perhaps.

Now, how do I know that there are ghosts hanging around all over the place? Simple. I am a ghost myself and no one's ever questioned this fact. At least no ghost has ever turned his/her back on me. I keep roaming through space and time, sometimes noticed, but mostly unnoticed by the non-ghosts. When noticed, they all scream "Go away!" and I too beat a hasty retreat. As I did, not too long ago, from this website. Believe me or not, ghosts are far more scared of non-ghosts than the other way round. This is why they keep hiding in closets and other cramped corners of the earth.

I have been somewhat uncertain though about the class to which I belong. Frankly, I have wanted to believe that I am a "Kaadal pisasu", but the non-ghosts have invariably pointed out to me that I was made in Taipei or wherever it is that "pei"-s are manufactured. So, I am caught in an identity crisis.

Be that as it may, let me explain why I dropped in unannounced somewhat in the nature of a cockroach on a sultry summer evening. Uncouth surely enough, but then God created me that way. I never asked God to create me at all. And having created me, he's forcing me to remain created in a state of terror in a world dominated by the non-ghosts! How unfair indeed!

Worse, God sent me your way to do things you are dead against. I have been collecting the stuff I had put up at IL and revising and polishing them. Of course, they will continue to remain here in their embryonic incompleteness too. There is nothing much I can do about it. Don't be mad, that's the way God created me. He told me that I have to keep on hating myself for all the things I had done in the past and try to achieve a state of cleanliness. That's all I was doing, copying an early post to a Word file in order to revise it. And then, suddenly, out of nowhere as it were, you showed up! I distincly saw you sitting on the branch of a tree swinging your legs and keeping a watch over my activities through a telescope. You scared the hell out of me.

To face a non-ghost without appointment is no fun. Frankly, I missed several heart beats. Yes dear, ghosts do have hearts, hearts that melt, hearts that burst in pain, and sometimes hearts that beat in adi tala or kaharwa. But they beat and I missed the beat. In fact I was humming a ghost song as I was collecting the garbage for purification and suddenly lost the rhythm. I stopped and gaped at you trying to find a place to hide myself. There were none available.

It is then that I realized that I was dying. Non-ghosts turn into ghosts (or, at least, are reshaped into ghosts) when they die. What happens to ghosts though when they die? Do they become non-ghosts?

And as I am slowly dying, this is the question I am carrying with me to the next world.

Who's a ghost prey and who a non-ghost?

Give it thought if you feel inclined to carry out empty exercises. Once in a while I might show up in your house. Rest assured, I will not show up in any other house. Don't be scared though. It won't happen all too often. Incidentally, I read your MJ post. He is the ghost now who moon-walked! What happened to Phantom though, the ghost who walked?

Cheers.

oj

Cheeniya · Jul 11, 2009

Dear OJ
It is rather uncanny to see your post here out of nowhere suddenly. Only a few days back, Kamal and I were talking about you and our visit to Kolkatta. If you are a ghost, please let us know the address of the tree from which you might be hanging like Bikram's baithal. We would surely visit you no matter in what form you exist. We love you so much that it will be a kind of pilgrimage for us.

Interesting to note that I scared the hell out of you. I do that to several men and women but it is the first time, I do this to a Ghost at noon! We miss you oj. Time you climbed down from the tall tree that is your abode and be one of us here! God has given you such an amazing writing skill to entertain fellow mortals like us. Dont you dare go about challenging Him! In the meantime. you are most welcome in IL in general and in my forum in particular
Love
Sri

Viswamitra · Apr 6, 2012

Dear Cheeniya Sir,

You may like to check with fellow moderators before you make a commitment to a spirit that he could join IL as I believe the membership is allowed only for mortals. With the writing skills OJ has, the rest of the bloggers might loose their readership. If IL decides to admit OJ as a member, giving an exception to the rule, they may have to write another set of dos and donts as OJ might invite other spirit friends to read his posts in IL and may request them to respond to his posts by requesting them to join as members as well.

I know the mortals have been so addicted to your posts and writing skills. But it is overwhelming to see that you are now getting responses from other worlds. In order to keep the spirits in good humor, you need to study them using your special skills. You have done a fabulous job of covering the fellow beings, animals and insects and so on and now you need to add another category. You already appeared to be knowledgeable about the variety of spirits and now you need to study each one of them and start writing about each one of them.

When we moved into the United States, we lived in an apartment with two bedrooms. My son who was 7 years old sleeping in one of the rooms, came into our bedroom indicating that his cot was moving in the night. We thought that he was scared to sleep alone and hence told him to sleep in our bed room. Then our parents-in-law came to visit us and my father-in-law slept in the room. He also told us that cot was moving in the night. That is when we recognized that something was wrong about the apartment. We quickly bought a house of our own and moved out.

Viswa

Cheeniya · Apr 6, 2012

Dear Viswa
Seriously, I rate OJ as the BEST WRITER of IL with the most original ideas and his sense of humour is awesome. He is a very sensitive artist and is prone to get put off very easily. He knows that when he stops writing, his ardent fans like me, can only wring our hands helplessly. I miss him more than anyone else in IL.

The moving cots are an exclusively western phenomenon as we saw in the 'Exorcist'. In India, cots hardly move and I'll tell you why. The house that I have leased in Chennai is a fully furnished one. The cots that the lessor has provided are no ordinary cots. They are provided with massive drawers in which all the unwanted junk is stored away. This causes each cot to weigh over a ton which is beyond the capability for the fragile Indian ghosts or spirits to move around.

Indian spirits specialise in just making a lot of noise and thus continue their good work when they were alive. If the ghost is that of a politician, you can expect the chatter to be non-stop! My grandma had a special ear for such noises and on the days when the ghosts took a day off, she could hardly sleep.
Sri

Srama · Jan 19, 2013

Dear Cheeniya sir,

an astounding 14,000 hits made me take a peek at the spirit world you wanted to speak of! I did not know that a bhutam represents the spirit of obese people. Sir! Should they not have the gift of feeling the light weight in the spirit world at least? I am a sissy when it comes to these topics but I have been reading with some fascination, Jaggi VasuDev's Mystics musings - nope not helped me in any ways! The whole story of the ghosts and goblins comes alive scarily during Halloween time and some of the theme parks go to the extremes of scaring in the name of entertainment and what is even better, there are people paying to go get scared. There is also a TV program which airs regularly on haunted houses. Forget the program, I don't even turn on the channel! The only movie I managed to see was The sixth sense two times because the first time I refused to recognize that Bruce Willis himself was a ghost and realized only when I watched it second time a few years later. I wonder where the little intelligence I have disappears sometimes!

Interestingly a neighbor and a good friend of mine who believes in only one birth and life after was amused at the thought that when humans pass on, they retain the human form, as assumed by me. Well, to explain more when she mentioned that every human being passes on either to hell or heaven, trying to understand the concept I made a comment to the effect that considering the population explosion on this earth where the heck is the space for everyone, considering human existence has been there for hundreds of thousands of years and taking into account both hell and heaven! It is an interesting thought to ponder on and now I wonder what would she think of this and the classification we have as well!

Cheeniya · Jan 20, 2013

My dear Srama
Ghosts and the stories of ghosts always fascinate everyone no matter if they believe in them or not. I have heard a lots of them during my childhood days from my aunts. These stories always caused my mouth to hang open in awe and fear and they found it easier to feed me with my mouth wide open. Vikramaditya's tryst with the 'betal' used to be the equivalent of Harry Potter in our days. I have repeatedly touched upon my early days in a colony in Triplicane. Those ladies excelled in narrating their encounters with ghosts. Some of the ghosts would come and take over their cooking. Some ghosts would substitute as spouses and some would keep calling them from every nook and corner of the house. The credibility of these stories would depend on the narrative power of the person concerned. Not a day of my childhood passed without a story of some ghost or the other. As I grew older they became rarer like the sparrows of Chennai.

Western films exploit the supernatural to the hilt. Compared to them, the desi ghost films are like a LKG English book in front of vintage Shakespeare. I am happy that people like Night Shyamalan exploit this western sentiment very successfully. In one film called Ghost Busters, guys come with state of the art gadgets to get rid of ghosts like the termite terminators and other pest control guys. But having said all this, I should confess that movies like Exorcist and the Omen series always gave enough exercise to my usually supine hairs by making them stand for hours!
sri

PriyaKathiravan · Feb 2, 2013

Ghosts, for all the bad press they receive, are nevertheless much loved by everyone . The world would be a decidedly dreary place had there been no ghost stories to keep us shiveringly entertained.

Western ghosts are too repulsive for my liking, i mean, all that "rotting flesh, dripping gore" kind of image is quite ugh , so putting off. ( The only western ghosts i like are Edith Wharton's short -story sprites and Prince Hamlet's father)

I love our own fantasmagorical ghosts who are much more entrancing , be it the jasmine garlands and silver anklets adorned Mohinis or the mischievous pigtailed dwarf of a kuttichattan or just plain cloudy whisps flitting around King Vikramaditya .........even the grinning long haired , white body-suited Vittalacharya Peis . What a colourful, memorable lot !

Envy your grandma, she actually saw one ! But i am not sure i want to meet one dangling from the ceiling. Much better if its one like the Bhoothnath Bacchan ; a tad unkempt maybe, but a reasonable fellow. Will feel free asking it just two questions :
1. why is its community partial to Tamarind Trees ?
2. Having been given a visa to the Otherside of the Moon, to the Great Unexplored Beyond, why do they insist on re-visiting this useless earth ?

Cheeniya · Feb 3, 2013

My dear Priya
I should say you have hit the nail on ghost's head! Till this day, well past my 70th birthday, ghosts stories never fail to keep me spell bound. I have a special love for the ghosts whose benevolence knows no bounds like the Alladin's gene. In its Tamil version (Pattinathil Bootham) it even executes the command of Jaishanker for a Tirupathi Laddu to a nicety with the priests from Tirupathi door delivering it to him chanting Suprabatham while the Laddu exchanges hands.

I can't agree with you more on the physical appearance of Western Ghosts. For people like us who are used to the likes of Kalyanaraman, western ghosts are indeed hard to stomach. As a matter of fact, I do not stand people who are even overly sweaty. The 'dripping gore' is indeed very repulsive. For the same reason, I don't even like the TV ads where the actor Abbas engages the dripping monsters of our western toilets while his customer keeps trying to touch her nose with the tip of her tongue. But for that digression, I would have gone to consumer court for banishing this Ad forever!

Coming to the ghosts' preference for Tamarind tree, I can only hazard a guess. Some of them love the drumstick trees too but most of them get put off by the infestation of 'kambli poochi' in drumstick trees and reluctantly move over to the Tamarind trees. Tamarind, as you may be aware, is highly acidic and liberal consumption of it results in hyper-acidity. It is through this route that the ghosts find it easy to enter the vulnerable human bodies. You might have probably come across this phenomenon in Digene ads in TV. Tamarind trees make it easier for ghosts to interact with humans in this way.

It is for the same reason that ghosts keep revisiting earth as they crave human company. The 'Great Unexplored Beyond' has been bad mouthed enough by the Hollywood guys and the creatures there are always shown as extremely keen on wiping out without a trace our Earth from the galaxy. How do you expect the ghosts who had their original moorings here to evince any interest in travelling to a place where everyone without exception keeps plotting some sinister scheme against their mother planet?
Sri

outofthebox · Jul 30, 2013

Dear Cheeniya sir,

For some weird reason, I was googling for "Aavi Amudha" and I hit upon your post in our own IL !!!
I think I can search for any topic right here than google searching anymore...I expected something eerie in your post, but having had good taste of your humor, I somehow felt it was going to be a humorous one than scare me !

Even as I am writing this, the same door in my room which used to bang due to light winds is now giving me creeps after reading a few fbs to your post !!! To add to this, my MIL seems to be coming to my room every now and then on some pretext in "Ram Gopal Varma" style !!! :boo::boo:

I have not experienced any of these spooky incidents to comment anything about it, but yes I get freaked out very easily after watching any spooky movies that I need someone by my side at such times....! :hide: