Come Again.. Or, have I?

I have decided it's high time that I have kept ignoring my inclination towards expressing my completely irrelevant thoughts in the light of less important things (ex: work, office). :D Well, I was just going through the multitude of drafts in my blog that had collected alphabetical dust over the past few years, having never seen the light of the desert that is in the middle of nowhere. I found many that will soon come out, a bit dusted and toned, but there is one that I would like to put up, uncut now.

14/06/2009

The last week was one of the most bizarre I've encountered, in terms of night-time adventures. One of the rare few string of days during which I've gone to bed extremely early (around 10.30 - 11pm), and dreamt the most inexplicable of dreams. But yesterday night will take the cake, baker and his oven in the Department of the Unexplainable. Let me jot it down before it trickles away, and I’ll try to interpret it later.

Scene: My home, the place where I've been staying since 18 years. Now, it's very important to picturise the venue of this incident to take in the fantastically out-of the world nature of this dream. I stay on the 3rd floor of our measly three-storeyed building, and there's a couple more flights of stairs separating us from the terrace. Meaning, from our flat (no. 25), the terrace cannot be viewed directly, but which can be done from no. 28. There is a small square space before every flat, and similarly, before the entrance to the open roof area, enough to put a chair or two.

Time: Sunset, around 17:45 hours, and my granddad is sitting on an easy chair in the squarish space before flat no. 28, and staring on in front (exactly at what, a person can't see from behind unless they walk up to that level, combined with the fact that the door to the terrace was not exactly open). I, after finishing a yummy snack, came out to wash my hands (Yes, there was a wash basin outside the house, and yes, my mind has the capability of conjuring up just about anything :|) and saw grandpa sitting alone, so I just went by to sit with him and spend some time. He told me to take him up the the last flight of stairs towards the terrace, and when we reached there, he told me to completely open the half closed door, saying he wanted to show me something. I was on his left side, closer to the door, and when I opened it, what I saw could not be digested with jaw closed. It was one of the most mysterious sunsets of my life. 

I pushed the door and it slowly twirled on its rusty hinges, to reveal a brightly shining, perfectly normal, evening sun. Then, just as we were admiring its beauty, in about 5 seconds it turned into a just-about-to-go-down beautiful, golden orangish hue-giving off, calm, all-pervading, light sun. I looked on, mesmerised. But then, in the next 5 seconds, the colour of it swept off to reveal a shy sky blue from right to left! Just as my sluggish mind realized it had to register panic, the sun camouflaged itself into the light it itself gave off to the sky (making it light orange), and dark black spots started hovering in the sky, in the place where earlier the sun was visible, making it appear as if there was a black sun in the sky, with huge chunks torn apart from it, and the other remaining chunks started vibrating violently as if they wanted to be set free from the tortuously restricted circular sunspace. 

The next few seconds were so shocking that I almost fell over on grandpa’s easy chair; the black spots actually broke off from the space (as if someone had suddenly jerked off the invisible chains holding them down to the roundish prison) and flew off, leaving behind nothing but the slightly orangish sky. When they were breaking free, it appeared as if the spots were great, big black bats that had all but covered the sun, and they were now flying away into the horizon after gobbling it down. 

No sun, for a few minutes, and then the cycle kept repeating. And when I looked back to see the expression on grandpa's face, he had dozed off.

I stood there, perplexed. All the contentment that my post-nap snack had filled me with was gone. What does this mean? Did I just see a novel form of eclipse that has never been witnessed before? Perhaps, Bird Eclipse? :| 

*At this point, I woke up, covered in sweat, as if I had been the one doing all the flying, cursing the pillow for being too hard, at which point, I realized that my pillow had actually been a set of internship assignments. Sigh.*

How three misplaced screws can screw you up equally well...

One long canvas bag.

Three forgotten screws.

Biting cold.

Saturn.

Murphy's Law.

:|

The insomniac author, for once, has all of the time (because of the insomnia), but no inclination to elaborate. Wildly formulated theories are welcome; persistent grilling is not.

Yours threadbarely,

me.

:O

Star parties always hold different meaning (not exactly; I couldn't think of any other flattering introductory line :P), especially when you're gonna be towing your own telescopes! Dunno why the one taking place later this day made me skim back to my last post on star parties. And rather unexpectedly, I realized something completely unrelated to stars. That, till very recently, I still wrote mostly for others. But now, I write only for myself. The conventional style's breaking away, the urge to write goody-goody falsely flowery things getting replaced by the satisfaction gained by twisting off-the-rocker things into catching shenanigans. Calibrating nonsense actually requires a sackful of sense :D

Hopefully, I'm improving.


P.S.: This almost turns out to be the shortest post in the history of the blog.
(To self:) Be ashamed.

Party of The Stars, Part 2

Well...yeah...so where was I last time? The self-promise of taking out time to blog almost every day has unwittingly fizzled out into nothingness! Time seems to have taken affinity to the F1, and drains out as quick as the washing machine PVC pipe these days![I got the idea of the weird comparison coz I'm sitting near the blessed machine right now, hearing it rumbling away serenely, at its own pace, with not a care about the world! Fortune doesn’t just favour the brave; it favours the non-living too! NOT FAIR man!]

So..yeah..coming back to...yes! THE star party! First of all, for those who came in late, a star party is a sort of astronomical gathering; where amateur astronomers[in this case, the COEP Astro Club] gather officially[at NIGHT, obviously!]to observe the path and position of heavenly bodies in the lovely star-spangled sky. Typically a dark sky site away from 'light pollution' is chosen as a location. Telescopes and binocs are the basic essentials, among others. So armed with li'l more than this sundry information, I had set out on this celestial [for want of a better word] venture.

Well. Kamshet. Quite a lazy town I would say. We chugged in at around 5'o'clock, only to find the folk shutting down shop for the day! With a bit of difficulty, and loads of dhakka-bukki, we managed to stick ourselves into 2jeeps...& 32 "healthy" people in two jeeps is hardly a joke, I tell you!! I was cramped beside the driver, making it potentially dangerous for the 17 lives[including the driver!] in the vehicle, as I was scandalisingly close to the handgear! Anyhow, the predicament was soon forgotten in the light of...aahhh.. THE VIEW! :D

Milton's inspiration, nothing less! Mine is just a naive attempt to capture the panorama...but let's try.

The rough-hewn path bumped us away. The brimming Panshet dam, the gentle caressing, comforting, cool breeze arising over it, as if taking us in its warm, effervescent embrace; protecting us, telling us 'I AM there'. The rose fields were a sight to behold...bunches of hybrid teas and grandifloras swayed round at intervals, as if waiting to serenade the Gods themselves! The budding corn twinkled innocently in the waning sunlight... And the sun itself! Setting in all its eternal glory! As if the hilltops yonder are basking in the wake of a lustrous crown... A lovely golden ball in the sky; full in the eyes; gently, gradually, but FIRMLY melting away into the horizon; pure in essence, transforming even the ugliest children of God into plain beauty; the greenery assimilating it drop by drop, till I never knew which is hill and which is sun...the goldenness overwhelmed me, shined through me, IT BECAME A PART OF ME. And it is during such times that I dearly wish I had a camera-phone on me...Ohh how I wish I could capture 'life' on print as in words! The greenhouses, the cute li'l homely cottages, the shady foliage, cattle; all the village needed was a bit of snowfall to look a perfect Christmas card in the top view! [too much of graphics! :D]

Anyhow, after an eventful ride of 40 minutes, we reached kshitija's farmhouse. Freshened up. Fell upon the food like TWO starving boar-hounds EACH of us!! My consequent oncoming sleep fled after being chased round the field by a cute (= mortifying) puppy named 'Vaghya'[I am mortally afraid of dogs of all shapes and sizes.] Got decked up in mufflers and jerkins till we couldn't recognize each other! And set out; a tight group of campers, aiming to conquer the heavens!

The fields provided a perfect site for mounting the telescopes. It started off with the seniors giving us the basic info about the sky, its layout, conventional ways of identifying the positions of stars, constellations, satellites, and flashes w.r.t others. I tried to memorise everything simultaneously; ME, with one of the sharpest memories humans can have, but it just went on and on and on! I gave up! Confusions abound. The seniors were practiced experts; but beginners like me were lost.

Anyhow, once we started the actual observation and got the hang, it was sort of easy. We collimated the moon, Mars, Orion [The Hunter], and a hoard of M-objects[short for Messier objects; lovely star clusters, fuzzy patches more like to the naked eye]. We saw almost 21 meteors! And, [I’m a li’l unsure] maybe just one Iridium flare blazed across the velvety sky! We traced all the 12 zodiac constellations. Plus Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Pegasus, Perseus, Sirius, Regulus, Aldebaran, Canis Major[The Great Dog], Canis Minor[The Lesser Dog], Ursa Major[The Great Bear], Ursa Minor[The Li’l Bear], Mensa, Lyra, Pavo, Hydra, Leo, Aries, Draco…Gawd!! Simply amazing the brilliant imagination of the human mind! Stars and shapes! I managed to capture the moon[just as it was setting] and Saturn at my first go! I was thrilled to the core, flushed and dizzy with excitement! Goosebumps erupted on my skin! [Although that maybe coz of the less-than-6deg temperature too! hehe]Stars and ONLY stars danced in front of my eyes! I definitely needed a break! As a matter of fact, every one did!

The cold seeped in as I went down. And it was THEN, while simply lying there, shivering in a flimsy jacket, gazing up at the heavens, cracking silly jokes, gorging on chocolate to keep awake, among some of the most wonderful and knowledgeable people I’ve known in my life; THEN, suddenly, outta the blue, it struck....the submissive vastness, the perpetual infinitum of the universe. Could anything ever try to emulate it? The all-pervading. Omniscient. You could sense its expanse! It absorbs EVERYTHING; takes ALL of us in its stride; the enormity of the responsibility the universe undertakes uncomplainingly overwhelmed me! I felt like a small dot in this gigantic stretch, moaning about my silly day-to-day troubles; all my bitterness towards so many others melted away in that single instant! I felt at peace with the world. With mankind.

The Milky Way stretched across; white on inky-black, like some mischievous li’l angel’s spilt his milk across the heavenly floors![Hope his mom spares him! :D] God is so romantic ain’t he! To have designed the lovely sky! Just the perfect scattering. Uncertainty sure has its own charm! I always used to wonder why folk always say “I wanna go to heaven!”…I mean… Don’t you love to live?!!? That used to be my point of argument. But lying there, I realized that, THAT, if anything, WAS a place I would love to die for!

Well, with much persuasion, it was around 4am when we finally got our asses off the ground. Scorpio was out as Orion had sunk. Scorpius is the only known constellation which has a clearly traceable shape in the sky befitting its name. You can look at it and instantly say THIS is Scorpio! Clearly defined forelegs and the magnificent sting. The mythological creature that was the downfall of the hunting great, Orion. That is signified by the rising of Scorpio during the setting of Orion! Cool na!

The whole night’s work had taken its toll on the telescopes. Dew settled snugly on the lenses, making any further clear viewing highly impacting on the eyes. Trupti called pack-up. My mind was still full of the night as we put away the instruments. The exhaustive but indispensable knowledge of the others simply bowled me over! Made me feel still more of a novice than I really am! But one always begins at the beginning innit?! I hadn’t slept an inkling!! I guess that says it all!

Garam chai and steaming hot kanda pohe[our hosts were Godsent!] back at the farmhouse revived us enough for the bumpy ride back to the station. Cameras clicked, good-byes said. And in true filmy ishtyle, three of us rounded the party off by hanging off the rear of the jeep through the whole of the 18km back to the railway station!! It felt awesome to feel the icy-cold air whipping through my hair [that AGAIN rhymes! i DO have something in common with Milton, after all.]; feel the astounded stares of the sleepy villagers sweeping me over as I hung on to the roof of the jeep; weaving through the early-morning stragglers...and then you know!

BACK TO THE GRIND.

Party of The Stars, Part 1

Back to the grind.

Back to the hectic schedule typical of an engineering student. After a very refreshing & much-needed hiatus of 1 golden month, back to the daily gruelling 8-8[not kidding]. Literally it tosses me into one of those nice gruelly gruels peasants just worship! College, classes, BC, still more classes,and still some more! Collateral. Come to think of it though, last week was a very different one. For a very pragmatic reason. Same time, 7-and-1 days ago; couldn't have been a more different situation; couldn't have been a more different place;.... couldn't have been A MORE DIFFERENT ME. Reeling back.......

Kamshet. A sleepy swaying village on the outer outskirts of Pune. The impatient wait for the end of the last lecture at college. The unplanned last-minute rushing off to Venus for buying[in cash!] the ever-elusive Commander. The consequent reduction of my normally-balanced lunch to scrounging on a greasy vada-paav. The comic fate of priya's toothbrush[I'll save you guys the danger of dying in splits by not mentioning it here!]. The incessant phone-calls from my mom & dad, who had assumed I'm going on nothing short of an Alexandrian war![I won't ever get why the idea of night outs won't appeal to moms and dads! In fact, I could do a Rowling on all the whimsical fancies moms & dads have concerning their sons & daughters! Hang on....maybe I WILL! watch out!] The scramble of 32 people at the SAME compartment of the local, in tow with 3 6"telescopes. The eleventh-hour changing of compartments[I'm still trying to find out a valid reason].

The tentative 1 1/4 hr. journey with me staring away shamelessly at one of my lesser-acquainted colleagues and him staring at me when HE THINKS I'm not staring at him[when I really AM outta the corner of my eye!]; wondering when(if ever!)the words of wisdom(or at least, words of 'recognisable' frequency)are going to pour out of his mouth, when he might have been wondering the same thing about ME! The final realization that switching on my Apple iPod would be a much more fruitful way of spending the remainder of the journey. The tragedy of the poor pencil-salesman on the local offering 4 lead-pencils for a meagre 10bucks! But Amen! We were finally aboard! And chugging on to my first ever star party! YAYY!

Man! Was I excited! There are a lot many amazing things I have done for the first time since stepping into COEP.... and I hope and pray that a lot more will come my way![wow! that rhymes! :D]