Naivedyam
Before Consuming, Offer Food Items to God… Before consuming any food items, whether it may be of sweet or salty items, let us first offer it to the god, by keeping the food items on our puja room at least for some time. After a few minutes only, we must have to open our puja room door, and then only, we must have to start eating the food items. We must understand one thing, that god only provides food to us, and hence it is our most important duty to perform food offering to the god. Similar to the Holy Christians who used to make a small prayer, before eating the food from their plate, we must also develop the practice of thanking the god, before start eating our food items kept on our plate.
But nowadays the practice of offering food to the god is reduced, since some of us consider it as an old religious practice. Some people also argue that god doesn’t require any food to eat, since he is not subjected to eating the food offered by us. Some people would even go to the extreme step, and they would ask us to show the vision of the god when he eats the food stuffs kept in our puja room! Rational speech cannot be applicable in case of food offering to the deities.
Thousand years back, when the holy food was offered by the small boy Nambiyandar Nambi, Lord Vinayaka appeared before him with a smiling face, and willfully ate the Prasad items kept by him in the temple. Most of the people question about the existence of god only to the Hindus, and in case of other religions, no one is raising their voice, with the fear, that their tongues might be cut by other religious leaders!
Some people who belongs to other religions, ask questions, whether any Hindu deities would come before us and whether they would grant boons to us? For those types of people, there is no need to give detailed explanations, since doing so, would result in lot of misunderstanding! Hence before consuming the food, at least let us make a small prayer to Ma Annapurna, the goddess of food, in order to express our gratitude to our Holy Divine Mother.
“OM MA ANNAPOORNAYA NAMAHA”
WRITTEN BY
R.HARISHANKAR