Shas­tri Boodan

Filled with sad­ness, scores of peo­ple gath­ered on Thurs­day night at the Cunu­pia Mar­ket to of­fer prayers for the soul of An­drea Bharatt and oth­ers who have gone miss­ing.

Re­li­gious lead­ers joined in the call for jus­tice and an end to crimes against women. The vig­il was host­ed by Ch­agua­nas East MP Van­dana Mo­hit. Or­isha Preist Ba­ba Ad­de­lon Brave­boy sum­moned the pow­ers of the Or­ishas to rain jus­tice on those who com­mit crimes against women in T&T. Brave­boy, who is al­so known as Ban­jela in so­ca cir­cles, told the gath­er­ing “I pray for jus­tice against every crime com­mit­ted against women at this time. I call up­on the Or­isha of jus­tice, Chango, you are the Or­isha of jus­tice. I call up­on pres­ence with light­ning to strike up­on the heads of the en­e­mies, those that are dis­re­spect­ing our women to­day.”

Ba­ba Brave­boy called on the spir­its to re­move all neg­a­tive in­flu­ences plagu­ing T&T.

Pen­te­costal Pas­tor Dale Des Vi­gnes called on the com­mu­ni­ty to stop re­main­ing silent and speak out when they see crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties in their com­mu­ni­ties.

Pun­dit Ravin­dranath Ma­haraj said he felt a deep pain for An­drea’s loss when the bad news was de­liv­ered ear­li­er on Thurs­day. Ma­haraj said her sac­ri­fice was not in vain and has brought the na­tion to­geth­er in prayer.

He said “She sac­ri­ficed her life for all of us to bring us to­geth­er in uni­ty, love and to­geth­er­ness.” The pun­dit said a spe­cial prayer ser­vice was held at his Ch­agua­nas tem­ple last Tues­day for An­drea. How­ev­er, he said Hin­du as­trol­o­gy showed that she would not have been found alive. He said peo­ple must strive to­wards be­com­ing more hu­man by fight­ing off the evil forces of lust, greed, anger, ha­tred, at­tach­ment and ar­ro­gance. He al­so plead­ed with women not to dress in a man­ner that would evoke lust­ful feel­ings in men.

Imam Im­ti­az Ali spoke with a heavy emo­tion­al tone in his voice. The Imam called on men to look out for their wom­en­folk in so­ci­ety. Ali said “ My heart bled to­day when I heard that news. I said hope when the guy said we will cut off her ears and send it for you, I said it was grand charge. When I heard that news to­day, that could have been my grand­daugh­ter, that could be some one of us daugh­ters. I can't put my­self in that fa­ther’s shoes right now.”

He said per­sons seek­ing to kid­nap should in­stead get a job or even beg rather than cause grief in the lives of oth­ers.

Mo­hit said she was very dis­tressed. She said so­ci­ety has de­gen­er­at­ed to the point when a per­son goes miss­ing fam­i­lies are now wor­ried about if they would find their bod­ies or not.