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. Rajeev MoothedathAugust 7, 2017 at 8:40 PM

    Nice...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Murthy K v v sAugust 7, 2017 at 10:17 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 7, 2017 at 10:28 PM

      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
  3. EngramsAugust 8, 2017 at 8:32 AM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 8, 2017 at 10:26 PM

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

      Delete
  4. Purba chakrabortyAugust 8, 2017 at 3:32 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 8, 2017 at 10:27 PM

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

      Delete
  5. sunaina sharmaAugust 9, 2017 at 6:32 AM

    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
  6. Pranju chakrapaniAugust 9, 2017 at 2:30 PM

    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
  7. ManiparnaAugust 10, 2017 at 4:28 AM

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

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

Joys of Onam and a reflection

Suppose that the whole universe were to be saved and made perfect and happy forever on just one condition: one single soul must suffer, alone, eternally. Would this be acceptable? Philosopher William James asked that in his 1891 book, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life . Please think about it once again and answer the question for yourself. You, as well as others, are going to live a life without a tinge of sorrow. Joyful existence. Life in Paradise. The only condition is that one person will take up all the sorrows of the universe on him-/herself and suffer – alone, eternally. What do you say? James’s answer is a firm no . “Not even a god would be justified in setting up such a scheme,” James asserted, knowing too well how the Bible justified a positive answer to his question. “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, so that the nation can be saved” [John 11:50]. Jesus was that one man in the Biblical vision of redemption. I was reading a Malayalam period...
19 comments
Read more

Are You Sane?

Illustration by Gemini AI A few months back, a clinical psychiatrist asked me whether anyone in my family ever suffered from insanity. “All of us are insane to some degree,” I wanted to tell her. But I didn’t because there was another family member with me. We had taken a youngster of the family for counselling. I had forgotten the above episode until something happened the other day which led me to write last post . The incident that prompted me to write that post brought down an elder of my family from the pedestal on which I had placed him simply because he is a very devout religious person who prays a lot and moves about in the society like the gentlest soul that ever lived in these not-so-gentle terrains. I also think that the severe flu which descended on me that night was partly a product of my disillusionment. The realisation that one’s religion and devotion that guided one for seven decades hadn’t touched one’s heart even a little bit was a rude shock to me. What does re...
10 comments
Read more

Loving God and Hating People

Illustration by Gemini AI There are too many people, including in my extended family. who love God so much that other people have no place in their hearts. God fills their hearts. They go to church or other similar places every day and meet their God. I guess they do. But they return home from the place of worship only to pour out the venom in their hearts on those around them. When I’m vexed by such ‘religious’ people I consult Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov in which there are some characters who are acutely vexed by spiritual questions. Let me leave Ivan Karamazov to himself, as he has been discussed too much already. In Book II, Chapter 4 [ A lady of Little Faith ], a troubled woman comes to Father Zosima, the wise monk, and confesses her spiritual struggle. “I long to love God,” she says. She knows that she cannot love God without loving her fellow human beings, or at least doing some service to them. The truth is, she says, “I cannot bear people. The closer they ...
11 comments
Read more