Plus ça change…

This news item in today’s paper says that a lot of people in Indonesia are blaming the earthquake – and other recent calamities – on their President because numerologists and other experts claim that he has an ‘unlucky’ name (or, for variety, an unlucky date of birth)! Other experts have strongly refuted the claim, insisting that the President’s stars are in fact ‘lucky’ for the country.

There is a saying in French: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more it changes, the more it remains the same). I sometimes watch how fervently our mothers tie all sorts of charms and amulets around various parts of their children’s bodies so that they may "do well in science" and get into the IITs or medical schools. Their children, if they at all notice the contradiction, find nothing embarrassing about it; indeed, some of them, having grown up memorizing science textbooks to get their master’s or doctoral degrees, get very angry when I laugh at their ‘scientific’ pretensions.

One has to pinch oneself sometimes to believe that one is living in 2009, not 1209.