CONCH SHELL BLOWING

You have heard Panditji Blowing Conch Shell in temples or during worships. The elders must have told you its auspicious. The sound that emanates from that shell. How auspicious ? What favor or charm does it bring? Is it a tradition, a myth we simply follow?

Lets forget conch shells. Have you watched singer singing in front of a glass till the glass shatters. Now what has this to do with conch shell blowing and its auspiciousness. When we ask why auspicious? Some of the relevant answers we get are :

Its simply auspicious because the sound resembles the universal OM humming.
                                                    OR
Its enhances spiritual experience of devotes during worship.

But then, in my part of the country ( I don't know whether this is done in other parts of India or not) Conch Shells are blown when the dead body is taken from home/hospital to cremation ground all along the way.

Now, the thing is that  the auspicious thing and spiritual experience is fine when it comes to temple and worship. But what has it to do with Conch Shell Blowing during funeral? Sometimes conch shells sound are used as signals in some places and in history. Still it does not fit well with taking a dead person to pyre.

Now, some more research now of late, have revealed that Conch shell blowing destroys pathogens.
That can be the logic behind its auspiciousness. This means the vibrations of conch shell blowing destroys disease causing germs in and around temples and places of worship( or may be some extent to pathogens inside devotees) and thereby delivering good health and hence auspiciousness.

Keeping in mind what we learnt above, lets apply the same to taking dead body to cremation ground blowing conch shell. When a person dies, obviously the body rots. The dead body void of internal defense soon becomes haven for all sorts of pathogens. The air around this gets polluted too. The logic of conch shell blowing fits here perfectly. It destroys these germs and keeps the well wishers of dead person health when they carry the person for cremation.

Are you serious? Tomorrow i'll sing a song and you will rise from death? Whats the science behind conch shell blowing killing pathogen. Ohh.. you must have forgotten about my earlier line - Have you watched singer singing in front of a glass till the glass shatters.  Welcome to the science of resonance. No doubt all of have studied in Physics what resonance is huh?  Its known that all living and non-living object has a natural resonant frequency. So what do you call this technology- Hmmm its called 'SHAKE THEM TO DEATH LOL!'

The sound from a conch-shell has very high quality factor indicating the sharpness of its resonance. Recent studies reveal -Scientists may one day be able to destroy viruses by mathematically determining the frequencies at which they can be shaken to death.

Now the beauty of the scenario is that we Indians are doing that without any mathematical modelling since ages. Tradition you see... its called tradition..




Some supporting References if you Wanna take further dive :
http://www.durvasula.com/Taranga/Acoustics_of_ConchShells.pdf
http://www.freegrab.net/resonance.htm
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/03/01/a-new-way-to-kill-viruses-shake-them-to-death.aspx
http://www.durvasula.com/Taranga/Acoustics_of_Chants_Shells_Bells_and_Gongs_Proc_of_Acoustics_2013.pdf
http://www.livescience.com/7472-kill-viruses-shake-death.html