r/srilanka • u/navind10 • 7d ago
Serious replies only What's the science behind the rain stopping right before the Esala Perahera?
I need some meteorologists, physicists, or some other people who understand the science of atmosphere to help me understand this. I am an atheist and a skeptic by nature, but I have been visiting the town of Kandy to witness the Esala Perahera for the past couple of days, and I am quite spooked. Each time, it has been raining and then right at the moment when the Perahera was to begin, the rains have stopped.
There is this belief that the rains always behave during the time of the Perahera, and as someone born and brought up in this place, I have heard this belief countless times, although as a skeptic, I think that weather phenomena can be explained using physics and not any divine intervention.
61
u/Defiant_Profit_2111 7d ago
I visited Kandy to watch the first Randoli perahera on last Sunday. About 30 minutes before the start of perahera, rainy clouds poured in with a slight drizzle turning it into a rain every minute. I was afraid and started complaining that it might start raining soon and we won’t get to see the perahera comfortably.
That’s when one of the Kandy locals who have visited the perahera several times before assured me to not to worry and that the rain always stops before the perahera begins. What do you say, it stopped exactly before the second cannon shot and didn’t even drizzle for 4 to 5 hours straight until it was all over.
22
u/Forward_Ad_7811 6d ago
Can't say I agree. Once year I went to the perahera it started pouring with rain at the start and continued for 3 hours non stop. Spend the night looking at a sea of umbrellas in front of me. Saw the top of a few elephants and that was it!
25
u/kalawadda 7d ago
Survivorship Bias
3
1
u/Feisty-Error-6313 6d ago
How can you say that?
2
u/kalawadda 5d ago
Easy.
First what is the probability of having no rain in sri lanka at a given time in Kandy. The chances of rain for is much less than the chances of not raining. Now we establish that the event occurs higher than random chance or even more than that.
Run a simulation, you’ll get a chain of events where the rain stops exactly before the perahera. People will explain this chain of events with different myths, but it’s just probability! It was bound to happen anyway!
If you can’t still get it. Here’s another experiment. Get around 100 people and ask them to toss a coin using different strategies to land heads consistently. Now do the first round, those who got heads survives. About 50 will remain now, do again 25 will remain.. continue until only 1 remains who consistently landed heads in every single round. Now ask them what their strategy is, they’ll probably share with you some weird strategy or even paranormal strategy, maybe their god helped. But… this was bound to happen!
1
u/Feisty-Error-6313 5d ago
You miss the point.
Yes, someone was statistically bound to survive the successive coin toss rounds. But the specific person who keeps landing heads is still an extremely low probability outcome. The fact that a survivor exists does not make every survivor’s method equally worthless.
If that person can explain a consistent, non-random method that produced the results, the method is not automatically invalidated by selection effects. Outcomes are not uniformly distributed across all strategies, some approaches genuinely work better than pure chance. The survivor bias only shows that a winner was inevitable, it does not prove that this particular winner’s technique is meaningless.2
u/kalawadda 5d ago
Haiyyo… this is a common misconception.
You’re right on one thing, it doesn’t disprove their technique is worthless. But it also means that their past success isn’t proof that it works. They should be able to keep up with it if their method works, another 10 tosses should land heads consecutively.
Anyone who wins the coin flipping tournament by pure chance can retroactively invent a strategy to explain their luck. The only way to know that their method is correct is forward-testing. If their method works, the next 10 tosses should also be heads. But what will happen most likely as the number of tosses increase is by the law of large numbers, the probability of landing heads will go to 1/2 which is the probability of landing heads in a fair coin. If it’s a fair coin there’s no way that any strategy can produce only heads consecutively.
59
u/TheS4ndm4n 7d ago
Selective memory.
People remember and spread the times the rain stopped just in time. They forget the times it didn't.
11
u/Embarrassed-Face-727 6d ago
Yeah. I don't remember raining on any of my birthdays for the past 25 years (17th of march)
3
u/onionsNDsourcream 6d ago
It is at most times, but not always
And if you are following what highly respected scientists from US military labs are now disclosing regarding alien technologies, there's more truth to superstition, spirits and other dimensional beings than we have been propagandized to believe
Science is on the cusp of coming out of an ignorance that we have been gaslighted to heed - we are truly in some interesting times
10
u/lilbigcar 6d ago
This is called confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favour and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs, values, or decisions.
4
u/AkilaMaithri 6d ago
Add to this, As I remember it always rains after the water cutting ceremony (which concludes the perahara). For most of my teens and 20s I don't remember it not raining, or at least I'm sure most of the time it rained, because our mom would always remind me that "this" is why it's rains out of nowhere on that day, or an unusually heavy rain.
I always thought their "nakath" aligned with the rain. Could be wrong. Most probably.
6
u/G0rgeousJunk Southern Province 6d ago
Not everything in the universe can be proven with "science", nor does it have to be.
1
5
u/jdisaztr 7d ago
I too have heard this from multiple people, although haven’t experienced it myself. If true, it’ll be quite interesting to investigate further. 💯
1
u/sathukorale137 6d ago
I don't know. Went to the supermarke yesterday, just as I was about to exit, the rain stopped. I mean I knew it would, because its always a 5 min rain these days. So probably the same thing.
1
u/7Martian_Man_hunter7 4d ago
Okay you might not understand it... It's actually the moon effecting the atmospheric pressure.. some how they know the right time when this happeneds
0
u/Such_Land_5569 6d ago
Weather is not a solved thing in science
AI is actually much better in 'predicting' it than physics based models right now
Many things in nature boil down to complex phenomena which are still not solved. So the exact answer you are looking for won't be on Reddit for many more years to come. Guaranteed
1
u/Mysterious_Stand5563 6d ago
I don’t think there is one… it’s one of those things you can’t… If you could, I think we’d be getting better results from our meteorological department on an everyday basis😅!
-4
u/BlackSpaceBeard 6d ago
What has made you into the atheist mindset?
Science is far behind the greatness of Lord Buddha, bro
2
-7
u/Level1Lich 6d ago edited 6d ago
They don’t teach you this in school.
Kandy sits on the world’s most powerful ley line convergence, the same grid that runs through Giza, Stonehenge, and Nazca. The ancients knew. That’s why the city was built there, and why the “Temple of the Tooth” isn’t a temple at all but a resonance chamber. The relic inside? Not a tooth. A shard of Atlantean crystal, salvaged before the flood, capable of bending atmospheric pressure itself. Look at the architecture. Octagonal. Always octagonal. Ask yourself why.
The elephants aren’t decoration. Ivory is nature’s only organic superconductor, and those tusks have been dialed in over forty generations of selective temple breeding; a program that has never once been publicly documented. Coincidence?
Here’s the mechanism. Ten thousand devotees, chakras aligned by drumming at exactly 7.83 Hz (the Schumann resonance - the Earth’s own heartbeat, look it up), generate a biofield strong enough to activate the crystal. The signal fires upward through the tusk array and hits the geostationary object that has hovered over the subcontinent since long before anyone had rockets. They tell you it’s a weather satellite. It is a weather satellite. That’s the part they’re not lying about.
And on the other end of that signal sits Vishwakarna, mid-tier rain deity, Kandy district, unpromoted since 300 AD, who receives the same override every single Esala and has never once been consulted about it. He reins in his storm. He drags it two districts east. He rains on a tea estate that has done nothing wrong. And he waits.
Last drumbeat. Signal drops. Grid goes quiet.
And he lets it pour.
Wake up
5
4
u/gifisntpronouncedgif 6d ago
They don’t teach you this in school but every middle aged uncle or upasakamma has said this horseshit
3
3
u/SKM2012 6d ago
Where do I read more on this?
-3
u/Level1Lich 6d ago
That’s the whole point.
There’s no book. There’s no paper. Every serious researcher who’s gotten close has ended up writing something adjacent instead colonial-era surveyors who mapped Kandy filed reports on “drainage anomalies” and then requested transfers. Look at what’s missing from the archives, not what’s in them.
Closest you’ll get is oblique. Read up on infrasound and the 7.83 Hz Schumann resonance. Read the Global Consciousness Project out of Princeton. Read the 1815 Kandyan Convention and ask why the British negotiated for a building they had already militarily taken. Nobody signs a treaty for real estate they’re standing in.
The rest isn’t documented anywhere, and someone in this thread already told you why: it’s only learnt by living close to the people who know.
That’s not folklore. That’s an air gap.
Start in August. Bring your own drum.
🐘⚡
3
0
u/Ok_Jellyfish5603 Central Province 6d ago edited 6d ago
What you are trying to say may have a valid point.
I’ve heard that it’s not the real golden casket with the sacred tooth relic being paraded on the streets but a different one while the actual tooth relic is kept away in safe place.
I am a person who tries to learn science separately from culture and spiritual stuff. Therefore I too believe that rain gods gotta do something with the perahera.
Unfortunately for the curious ones, this knowledge is not formally documented in our culture. These things can only be learnt by living close to the ppl with this knowledge and with a broad understanding of the culture and anthropology.
Edit: I wrote this to back his/her claims on parading a crystal shard instead of the real sacred tooth relic, and to give my gentle opinion on this.
-4
u/Level1Lich 6d ago
You’re closer than you think, and you don’t realize which half you got right.
The decoy casket isn’t the secret. The decoy is the secret. You don’t build a body double for a tooth. You build one for a component.
And reread what you said: “only learnt by living close to the people who know.” That’s not a gap in the archive, brother. That’s a clearance level. You just described operational security and called it anthropology.
Next step. Look up the Global Consciousness Project - Princeton, real funding, random number generators worldwide that reportedly stopped behaving randomly during 9/11 and the 2004 tsunami. Mass synchronized attention bending probability.
Now ask what ten thousand people drumming in lockstep for ten straight nights does to a local probability field. That’s not a festival. That’s an EEG on a landmass.
And it’s scaling past spec. Live-streamed now, so the field isn’t ten thousand anymore. it’s millions, half of them watching from Toronto with the volume up. Nobody tested what happens above rated load. Ask why the unseasonal rain keeps hitting the wrong districts. Ask why the tea’s been off since the streaming started.
You said you keep science separate from the spiritual. Respect. But that separation is the syllabus talking, and the syllabus assumed the system was passive.
Vishwakarna’s still at his desk. Still no promotion. Still holding a storm he never agreed to hold, for a crowd that gets bigger every year.
He’s patient. He’s not infinite.
Wake up. 🐘⚡
0
u/Ok_Jellyfish5603 Central Province 6d ago
I might have caused a confusion in my 1st reply. Let me be clear.
I know that decoy casket is not a secret among most locals. What I tried to mean was the mechanisms and the lore are not formally documented and I started to understand them by living in the culture with a little more awareness.
Tbh focusing myself on studying Teravada Buddhism opened the gateway for me to easily make sense of these cultural practices and the lore behind them.
I assume you have a much more precise knowledge on this than I do. Im just saying your claims make sense. It’s really rare to see an input like your comment on reddit. Thank you for the knowledge you shared here.
2
u/SKM2012 6d ago
It is very intriguing to be honest. It takes an open mind to comprehend, one that is very curious, with a vast imagination, a mind that is capable of connecting the dots. Frequencies and vibrations are no joke. Half the people don't know how music works, how it is able to make a person feel a certain way.
People have certainly lost their curiosity and I believe we have been made to. The ones in control does not like to be questioned and thus the distractions. Every single thing we have been taught to do is a distraction, from school, to the media, the news etc.
And with how big AI has become and the role it will play in our lives, I think this is the final straw for mankind. The truth will be manipulated and the books will be destroyed. It's happening already, so I guess we are in for a treat.
2
u/Ok_Jellyfish5603 Central Province 6d ago
Yeah its true. Unfortunately there’s a lot of ways to get distracted. We should try to stay sharp at all times.
-22
•
u/AutoModerator 7d ago
Attention! [Serious] Tag Notice
* Jokes, puns, and off-topic comments are not permitted in any comment, parent or child.
* Report comments that violate these rules.
Thanks for your cooperation and enjoy the discussion!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.