Circles on the asphalt, walking on women and irreplaceable birds: strange traditions of mysterious India (15 photos + 2 videos)

Huge and advanced, honoring traditions and open to everything new, interesting and incomprehensible - this is all India.





Indians have many strange and not entirely clear to residents of other countries rules and quirks. New ones appear regularly, and these are just a few of them.

1. "Chalk of Shame"



Brightly colored circles, hand-drawn with chalk, began appearing on the roads of India. People thought it was a kid's game. Others were afraid - maybe it was a UFO or a conspiracy of a secret society?

But in reality, it was an attempt to draw attention to a huge problem in India - no one throws cigarette butts in the bins.

A youth trend has been launched in India. Young men and women in the state of Maharashtra have started to highlight cigarette butts by drawing circles around them with chalk as part of a campaign called "Chalk of Shame".

India is currently trying to implement the practice of plogging – collecting trash while jogging, but it’s a drop in the ocean: it’s impossible to take all the trash with you. The guys found another way – circling the trash with chalk, limiting themselves to cigarette butts.





For some unknown reason, smokers don’t think they’re polluting the area because the cigarette butts are tiny. But the thing is that filters and other elements of cigarettes don’t decompose as quickly as paper and contain quite a lot of microplastics.

And these circles around cigarette butts on the road were supposed to appeal to the conscience of smokers and show that the entire road is actually strewn with them, they are not so unnoticeable.

Modern youth is fighting with ordinary people who live by the thousand-year-old habit of throwing everything under their feet.

Although the country banned smoking in all public places in 2008, this ban was not particularly effective, as evidenced by the abundance of cigarette butts.



Do circles on the asphalt help? There was a certain effect. The owners of the shops and eateries that had the most circles ended up putting bins at the entrance so that people could throw their trash in them.

But unexpectedly, the "Chalk of Shame" became popular among... women with children. It is logical that no mother wants her child to start smoking and ruin their health. And they turned circling cigarette butts with chalk into a game with the child so that the baby would immediately remember that a bad habit is bad.

2. Walking on ladies



You can call this ritual more crudely - walking on women. And this name will very accurately reflect the essence, although in a figurative sense.

This is what happens at the annual Diwali fair: about 200 women lie down on the road and suffer while priests and “healers” walk on their backs.



It’s part of a fertility ritual that’s been going on for over 100 years. Women ask priests to walk on their backs, believing that it will help them get pregnant. And almost every year, videos of the unusual festival called Madhai Mela, a Hindu festival, go viral.

Usually, it attracts desperate women who can’t get pregnant, and older women who have been trying to have children for over 10 years. Natural attempts and even IVF have been unsuccessful. And all that remains is to lie at the feet of a priest so that the gods will gift the desperate woman with a child.



Indian women run from the beginning of the path to its end so that they can be trampled twice. They believe that the priests possess the spirit of the Hindu goddess named Angarmoti.

Fertility rituals exist all over the world. But most of them are symbolic. For example, putting an egg under the pillow of newlyweds on their wedding night.



But poor Indian women have to bear the brunt physically, enduring pain and inconvenience, because a wife in India is considered an inferior person until she gives birth to a son for her husband. In an attempt to correct the situation, the poor things grab at any, even such strange ways to give birth.