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

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 4

The footpath between Park Avenue and Subhash Bose Park The Park Avenue in Ernakulam is flanked by gigantic rain trees with their branches arching over the road like a cathedral of green. They were not so domineering four decades ago when I used to walk beneath their growing canopies. The Park Avenue with its charming, enormous trees has a history too. King Rama Varma of Kochi ordered trees to be planted on either side of the road and make it look like a European avenue. He also developed a park beside it. The park was named after him, though today it is divided into two parts, with one part named after Subhash Chandra Bose and the other after Indira Gandhi. We can never say how long Indira Gandhi’s name will remain there. Even Sardar Patel, whom the right wing apparently admires, was ousted from the world’s biggest cricket stadium which was renamed Narendra Modi Stadium by Narendra Modi.   Renaming places and roads and institutions is one of the favourite pastimes of the pres...
12 comments
Read more

Good Life

I introduced A C Grayling’s book, The God Argument , in two earlier posts.   This post presents the professor’s views on good life.   Grayling posits seven characteristics of a good life.   The first characteristic is that a good life is a meaningful one.   Meaning is “a set of values and their associated goals that give a life its shape and direction.”   Having children to look after or achieving success in one’s profession or any other very ordinary goal can make life meaningful.   But Grayling says quoting Oscar Wilde that everyone’s map of the world should have a Utopia on it.   That is, everyone should dream of a better world and strive to materialise that dream, if life is to be truly meaningful.   Ability to form relationships with other people is the second characteristic.   Intimacy with at least one other person is an important feature of a meaningful life.   “Good relationships make better people,” says G...
21 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...
6 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let...
36 comments
Read more