Skip to main content

Eclipse




From Times of India
Sporadic monsoon clouds smudge the night sky as I look out for the moon which struggles to shine through the haze.  There’s going to be partial lunar eclipse tonight, the newspapers say.  I’m interested in eclipses.  I am an eclipse myself.

The most memorable eclipse was when I was in Shillong.  It was in the last decade of the millennium.  I was sitting with a friend in his room when the air outside resounded with sounds of tin drums.  We came out to see what was happening.  Everybody was celebrating something.  Our landlady rushed to us with two tin drums and asked us to join.  It took us a while to grasp what was going on.  There was a solar eclipse.  The people believed that a dragon was swallowing the sun and the tin drums were meant to scare the dragon away.  Since the landlady insisted that we join in liberating the sun from the dragon, we did lest we be accused of gross neglect.  How criminal it would be to let the sun be swallowed by a dragon?  Moreover, it gave us much thrill to think that our tin drums were going to make themselves heard 150,000,000 km away.  It gratified our egos, to say the least.  My friend and I contributed our bit to the cacophony. 

I don’t know how many people in that whole horde of drum beaters actually believed that they were delivering the sun from the dragon.  The passion with which most of them beat the drums indicated that they were indeed serious about their mission.  Aren’t quite many of our rituals similar ego-gratifications?  How great we must feel to perceive ourselves as warriors against the powerful devils out there in the vast space around us!

If the heavens permit me, if the clouds clear, I shall stand outside tonight, beneath the diaphanous sky, in the penetrating quietness of the bucolic darkness except for the vibrating tymbals of cicadas in the leaves, I shall stand gazing at the moon being eclipsed slowly, partially, slowly…

Comments

  1. Sometimes we have to do things like that, tin drums.. however a new and novel concept.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. But the clouds have become darker, the moon has vanished... Tin drums would land me in a mad house here in this small village in Kerala! 😀

      Delete
  2. Well the tradition of making noise to scare away the dragon from swallowing the sun is across the cultures in various parts of the world. I got to know about the mythology and practices only yesterday while browsing about blind beliefs that goes with an eclipse . Nice to have experienced it in person .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True, many people have that belief and practice. It's also fun for many, I guess.

      Delete
  3. Thank you for sharing this wonderful and amusing memory. I missed watching the eclipse last night :\

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I couldn't catch it either Purba because of the clouds.

      Delete
  4. Loved the poetry in this prose. Traditions are practiced followed blindly from generation to generation. The strong that you have narrated would be a good theme for a children's book. I have read somewhat similar one where the moon is being swallowed by a dragon and the animals come together to chase it away - the message there is quite different than the thing that was happening in Shilling however.

    ReplyDelete
  5. For tonight, Tomichan, the cicadas would suffice. But for tonight.

    The sun awaits us on the other shore with shrieking cacophony of tin drums. But for tonight let's be happy with the cicadas.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I did venture out and managed to click some pictures of this amazing celestial phenomenon.... :-)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Prelude to AtoZ

  From Garden of 5 Senses, Delhi [file pic] Hindsight gives an unearthly charm and order to the past. There can be pain too. A lot of things could have been different, much better, if only we possessed the wisdom of our old age back in those days. As a writer put it, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and a lot of those guys must have thought, “I wish I had known this some time ago.” Life is a series of errors with intermittent achievements. The only usefulness of the errors may be the lessons they teach us. Probably, that is their purpose too. We are created to err so that we learn, I dare to put it that way. I turn 64 in a month’s time. It’s not inappropriate to look back at some of the people whom life brought into my life so that I would learn certain lessons. No, I don’t mean to say that life has any such purpose or design or anything. Life is absurd. People come into your life as haphazardly as vehicles ply on your road or birds poop on your head. Some of these people change the chemist

Why I won’t vote

From Deshabhimani , Malayalam weekly Exactly a month from today is the Parliamentary election in my state of Kerala. This time, I’m not going to vote. Bernard Shaw defined democracy , with his characteristic cynicism, as “ a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve .” We elect our government in a democracy. And the government invariably sucks our blood – whichever the party is. The BJP and the Congress are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee though the former makes all sorts of other claims day in and day out. BJP = Congress + the holy cow. The holy cow has turned out to be quite a vampire and that makes a difference, no doubt. In our Prime Minister’s algebra, it is: (a+b) 2 which should be equal to a 2 and b 2 . There is an extra 2ab which is the holy cow. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm , the animals revolt against the human master and set up their own nationalist republic. Soon politics develops in the republic and some pigs become leaders. The porcine

How Arvind Kejriwal can save himself

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have a clear vision. Eliminate all opposition. Decimate them or absorb them. My previous post [link below] showed a few people decimated by them. Today let’s look at the others: those who are saved by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]. 1. Himanta Biswa Sarma  This guy was in Congress and faced serious charges related to the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam. He also faced corruption charges related to drinking water supply in Guwahati. His house was raided by the Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI]. Then he switched over to BJP and all his crimes just vanished. It’s as simple as taking a dip in the Ganga and all your sins are forgiven. Today he is the chief minister of Assam. Nothing is heard of all the charges that were levelled against him. 2. Amarinder Singh  This former Captain in the Indian Army was a Congressman until Modi’s Enforcement Directorate [ED] started raiding him, his son and his son-in-law. He put an end to all those raid

The Good Old World

Book Review Title: Dukhi Dadiba and irony of fate Author: Dadi Edulji Taraporewala Translators: Aban Mukherji and Tulsi Vatsal Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 314 If you want to return to the good old days of the late 19 th century, this is an ideal novel for you. This was published originally in Gujarati in 1913. It appeared as a serial before that from 1898 onwards in a periodical. The conflict between good and evil is the dominant motif though there is romance, betrayal, disappointment, regret, and pretty much of traditional morality. Reading this novel is quite like watching an old Bollywood movie, 1960s style. Ardeshir Bahadurshah, a wealthy Parsi aristocrat in Surat, dies having obligated his son Jehangir to find out his long-lost brother Rustom. Rustom was Bahadurshah’s son in his first marriage. The mother died when the boy was too small and the nurse who looked after the child vanished with it one day. Ratanmai, Bahadurshah’s present wife, takes her

Kejriwal’s Arrest in Modi’s Kurukshetra

For some mysterious reason, Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest reminded me of Haren Pandya. Maybe, because Pandya’s 21 st death anniversary is approaching (26 March). Have you forgotten Haren Pandya? He was the Home Minister of Gujarat before Narendra Modi assumed dictatorial powers in that state. Modi chose to teach humility to Pandya by making him the Minister of State for revenue. Pandya chose not to learn humility from Modi and resigned from that post in Aug 2002. Remember Gujarat of 2002? You should. A fire engulfed a train on 27 Feb 2002 killing 58 Hindu pilgrims who were returning from Ayodhya where they had gone to discover their god, not very unlike Christopher Columbus undertaking a voyage to discover India and messing it all up. What caused the fire in the train? Lord Ram knows probably. The upshot was that there was a riot in Gujarat by Hindus against Muslims. Haren Pandya is one of the BJP leaders who gave statements in many places indicting Modi for the riots. He asser