What is Sankranti?


It means the day today is the day the sun crosses over from the Tropic of Capricorn to the Tropic of Cancer. It is a very big day for us because, now during the summer time we have the harvest, and we look forward to the rain and so many things that happen in every country. The sun falls at right angles in this country during the summer season and so we welcome the sun. We eat something that we must have eaten already what we call as til and Jaggery. It is to prepare your body and your mind to give it sufficiency to receive the sun. Because if you are living in the cool season, then all your body mind becomes lethargic and you become also sometimes very lazy about things in the sense that the day is so small that you cannot achieve many results. So the body has become cold as we call it. We take these things, which give us heat so body is prepared to receive the heat of the sun to welcome.

To overcome the inertia setting by the cold weather and also to liberate the body’s strength to the sun, people take to all these ways of treating you by which they give you something that is heat creating in the body. But it has another very subtle expression, which I find is when they give you these they say now you take now til and gul and you say things, which are sweet. Because when you are taking til and gul, your body gets heated and you become right sided. When you become right-sided person you seldom speaks sweetly. So it is a contrast that they give you a thing to heat you up so that your body gets heated up but you must be sweet. So there is a warning that you are eating all these things but that doesn’t mean now you ride on a big horse of ego and start splashing every one. It’s a very subtle thing to understand that when we become temperamentally right sided, we are so much covered by our ego that we do not feel that we are hurting others by what we say.
Text from: 1985-0114: Makar Sankranti Puja in Suryavanshi hall at Mumbai India
Photo: Creative Commons licensed photo by flickr user '8#X'