The Power of the Gaze: Nazar Is Not Superstition. It’s Cultural Memory.

—A reflection from Spin A Yarn India

“Nazar lag gayi.”

It sounds like a joke. A phrase we say with half a smile when something goes wrong—after things were going too well. We’ve learned to laugh at it. But beneath the humor is an older truth, whispered across generations, embroidered into lullabies, hidden in rituals, etched in language. Nazar is not myth. It is memory. A cultural memory of something we’ve forgotten how to see.

When something good begins—an idea, a relationship, a change—it exists in a delicate state. Unformed. Vulnerable. The moment we speak of it, we place it under a gaze. And every gaze carries energy. Not all of it benign.

Ancient cultures knew this long before modern physics caught up. The observer effect in quantum mechanics formalizes what the world’s grandmothers already knew: to observe something is to alter it. Joy, once seen, becomes fragile.

Our ancestors didn’t need labs to tell them this.

• In India, black dots are placed behind a baby’s ear, lemon and chillies hang at shopfronts, coal marks guard brides.

• In Egypt, the Eye of Horus offered divine protection.

• In Turkey, the blue glass nazar boncuğu watches over homes.

• In China, Bagua mirrors repel unwanted spiritual attention.

• In Africa, beadwork and amulets act as shields.

• In South America, children are “swept” with herbs to clear envy.

These were not connected cultures. There was no shared language, no internet. And yet, they all arrived at the same insight: human attention has force. It can carry warmth, but it can also scorch. Even those who love us are not immune. Envy doesn’t always roar; often, it whispers.

You announce a marriage—and someone remembers heartbreak.

You speak of a promotion—and someone recalls rejection.

You move into a new home—and someone feels their own loss.

Even celebration stirs shadows.

This is why, in deeply logical households, the phrase still slips out when misfortune follows joy:

“Kisi ki nazar lag gayi.”

It’s not superstition. It’s recognition. A quiet admission that not all attention is neutral. That early-stage things need protection—not just from failure, but from exposure.

But today, we dismiss this knowledge. We call it backward. We’ve forgotten that what we now call “rationality” once uprooted entire systems of ancestral wisdom. Colonial education replaced indigenous storytelling with textbooks, turning oral memory into silent shame. We memorized facts but lost the feeling of knowing. We preserved scripts but forgot what they meant.

At Spin A Yarn India, we say: revive the stories. Not because they are relics, but because they are tools. Stories told in Meitei, Tamil, Kannada, or Awadhi remind us how the world was once felt, not just measured. They remind children that language carries more than grammar—it carries inheritance.

In our rush toward the future, we have lost the lens to look back. To see what has been lost in plain sight.

That is why I believe in nazar.

Not because I fear others, but because I understand how energy moves. I’ve seen how silence preserves. How stillness protects. How light, when focused without permission, can leave a scar.

We don’t describe a flame while it’s being lit.

We don’t name a tree when it’s still a seed.

We don’t shout our beginnings into a world not ready to hold them gently.

Nazar is not fear. It’s cultural intelligence. It’s the ritual of sheltering what is tender, what is not yet ready to withstand the world.

It’s a story our ancestors told again and again.

Let’s tell it once more—this time, in our own languages.

Because memory fades. But stories bring it back to life.