The inauspicious Tilaka
Diwali, the festival of lights, is just around the corner. Of course it's is the biggest festival here in India.
Like every Indian, I like Diwali a lot too, minus the smoke and noise of the crackers of course. But for me mainly, it means that I get to buy stuff and not explain its importance to my parents.
Let's get to the point here. So every Hindu ceremony involves this practice of Tilaka, which is really not great for people with allergies. However, those (weaklings) are out of the scope of my concern.
The real issue with me is the ingredients of said Tilaka. Each Tilaka involves a bunch of kumkum or other material, water as a solvent, and rice.
Lets do the math now.
A pound of rice has about 29000 long white rice grains.
Therefore,
weight of single long grain = 1/29,000 pound.
Lets reduce it to 1/50,000 a pound (accounting for various grain sizes).
Assuming each Tilaka contains at least 10 grains, we get the approximate weight of rice of Tilaka per person as -
1/50000 * 10 * 0.453592 kg
= 0.0907185 g
Now, according to the most recent census (2011), India has a 96.63 crore Hindu population. Now, each household must hold some ceremony once during the year, if they identify themselves as such.
So, multiplying the weight of a single Tilaka with the total number of people gives us -
0.0907185*96,63,00,000 grams
= 87661286.55 g or
87.66 metric tonnes
of rice, simply wasted.
I'll just leave it at that.
(Edited)
