BENGALURU: A group of 150 men from different parts of the country — including 16 from Karnataka, 12 from namma Bengaluru — on Wednesday performed ‘shraadha’ (last rites) and ‘pishachini mukti puja’ of their former wives. The group was part of Save Indian Families, a group of harassed husband’s association’s All India Meet which happens every year.
Speaking to Express, Kumar V Jahgirdhar, President of Child Rights Initiative For Shared Parenting (CRISP) said: “Due to some other commitment I couldn't attend this event. This idea was discussed much before along with Amit Deshpande. He headed the team from Maharashtra and Karnataka and this idea was executed extremely well.”
Amit Deshpande, a social activist, who went through his own journey of harassment and “years of long ordeal of court visits” said, “All of us felt extremely good to take that dip in Ganga to get rid of any bad memory of our past marital relationship. This kind of ritual was a much needed one to make “harassed men” feel much better psychologically and move forward in life,”
Save Indian Families fights for the rights of men and holds national level conference to address the issues related to “harassed men” and fight for their rights. This year it was held in Varanasi. Seeing this as an opportunity, “we decided to even do the ‘pishachini mukti puja’ wherein we chanted mantras to destroy all the evils in our society which would affect us in the form of women,” he added.
Another ‘harassed husband’ Vikram Rao (name changed), a software engineer who attended the event said, “I felt extremely good when I was actually doing the pinda pradhan for my wife and her mother. I was under terrible depression. Now I feel relieved.”
After the success at Varanasi the association in Bengaluru led by Jahgirdhar is planning to do something similar very soon at Srirangapatna.