Solar Eclipse

Right now I'm sitting in my dad's office. Being a physicist he's stuck posters to the wall on various things: Bose-Einstein condensation, telemetry images by satellites, photographs of various solar eclipses that have occured and star charts. One of these caught my attention. It was a poster on the solar eclipse that occured on 24th October 1995 in India. I was in class nine at the time, and in my childish and naive enthusiasm for science I had made a pin hole camera to observe the sun and we'd gone to Nim ka Thana in Rajasthan, one of the places lying in the belt of totality. Scientists from other countries had come with sophisticated equipment and telescopes and I felt embarrassed with my puny little piddling toy. Still, I observed through it, if only for the sake of the effort and trouble I'd been at to make it. So that was how I spent 24th October 1995. Little did I know as I was looking at the sun with my crude instrument, that seven years later I would run into someone who was celebrating her birthday on that very day, when the sun was being eclipsed by the moon.

Talking about eclipses, there was another one I'd visited, I do not remember exactly when, perhaps it was in my B.Sc days, but it was in Bhuj, Gujarat, this time. This was another lovely experience. Set in the Saurashtra region, the place is arid as a desert. Dry winds deposited quintals of sand in our hair, as scientists battled with their equipment. I was with a friend, and we were having the time of our lives. He was, rather is, a Gujarati, and we were talking about pretty lewd and interesting things. We were some distance away from my dad, who was with a Questar telescope, with filters and a rotating platform to counter the earth's rotation; pretty slick. I do not exactly remember if we could watch the eclipse, I think the clouds had played spoil sport.

My dad's back from the bank, and I gotta go. I must not let him see this. But the place we were staying at was like an old royal Gujarati palace; perhaps it was. And strangely enough it was one of those places which one thinks one has seen earlier in a dream.