On one side, the entire Universe and on the other Kannagi’s Pearls and Rubies

On an absolutely dark and starry night, somewhere in the western sector (the “somewhere in the western sector” phrase always invokes a splendid sense of drama in my mind, of pilots and their fighter aircraft on Alert and suddenly with sirens blaring, they scramble to intercept an enemy …), Sango and I got airborne for a ferry back to base. With the usual set up formalities completed, which meant that we were cruising at our intended level, at the correct speed, the aircraft navigating accurately with the help of GPS and on autopilot meant that we had precious little to do. A regular scan of the vital parameters including the TCAS and few and far interspersed RT natter was all that broke the reverie. The route we were flying thankfully was sparsely frequented, which meant that neither was there much traffic, nor were there any major towns and cities below.

The Milky way as seen from Mt Paranal Obsrvatory

                Having finished the in flight snack, a kind of wooziness was beginning to creep in, when suddenly, a flash of light streaked across the sky. “Did you see the shooting star I exclaimed?”, completely wide awake now. We both scanned the skies to spot any other streak but sadly that wasn’t to be. But what we did notice, at 35000 feet, free from the haze and dust of the earth, free of the interference from terrestrial light was the dance of the cosmos all around us. From end to end, as far as we could crane our necks, we could see the star studded sky and like a light saber slashing through the sky and cleaving it into two halves, with steamy vapours swirling around was the Milky Way. I could only be tremendously envious of the astronomers who lived and worked at Mt Paranal, witnessing the wonder of creation as they peered into the depths of the cosmos every night.

               

Orion-the Hunter

We spotted Orion the hunter and identified his belt, his sword, his shoulders and his bow. We traversed across the sky to spot the “Big Dipper” or the Wheel Barrow and saw how we could spot the Pole star from the Dipper.  Contrary to popular belief, the Pole Star, North Star or Polaris is not the brightest star in the sky. That title belongs to Sirius Major. And why is the North Star of such importance to us Navigators, of the land, sea and the sky? Because it’s the only thing in the firmament which stays constant ALWAYS. Imagine you are a prophet and instead of your followers, the common people standing beneath you, your followers are the stars of the sky. Now navigate to face the North Star and raise your arms, much like Moses did when he held the 10

The Big Dipper

commandments up. Instead of the commandments, you are touching the sky and imagine it to be a 2 Dimensional sheet of dark paper with pinpoints of light, which are the stars in the sky. Now swivel your arms, left hand down and right hand up (Michael Jackson style- leave out the pelvic thrust though:-p) to rotate the night sky. The entire sky will rotate ABOUT the North Star; it stays constant (in line with the axis of Earth’s rotation-at least for the next 5-6000 years!!) The best way is to experience it and not imagine it. Choose a beach, a hilltop or any elevated place, spot the North star and then the Big Dipper, Orion or the Cassiopeia and follow its position every half an hour and you will actually SEE the sky rotate and if you are a little high on hash or some stuff, you can feel the Earth rotate !!!! (Try Manali, both for the sky and the Hash!!) We unfortunately couldn’t spot Cassiopeia or the “W Star” because she was submerged beneath the horizon and our journey was too short for her to rise above Gaea, the Greek Goddess who was the Earth.

We could only gaze in awe and wonder at this spectacle surrounding us and wonder how someone could ever doubt the existence of a higher power. The night sky truly makes you feel insignificant. Another place to experience the night sky in all its glory is to take a “Night Desert Safari” in Jaisalmer. Aparna & I had done this in 2001 and our companions were two Britishers, husband and wife. We set off in an open topped Jeep at about 9 in the night after a good meal and our affable and garrulous driver Umed Singh, with a thin but sharply upturned moustache regaled us with stories of bravery of the Rajputs of yore. Having visited a temple at Ludarva, as we were halfway to someplace else, I happened to look up and was transfixed by the night sky. I quickly asked Umed Singh to stop and we all jumped off the Jeep and I led Aparna and the Brits to lie down on the sand by the road, as we saw the most unimaginable number of stars in the clearest of night skies from horizon to horizon, all 360 degrees around. It felt like someone had just transported us from the earth deep into interstellar space.

Back to 2017. My neck felt a little stiff from all the craning and I let it rest by turning my head down and to the right. As I did so, I saw out of the right windscreen and saw something I had never seen before. We were traversing over the land of Rajasthan, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh and these regions are sparsely populated. So instead of large villages well connected by roads, you have small clusters of villages called “Dhani” (In Rajasthani) pockmarked across the surface of our land. They are non descript and unexceptional during day. A few tens of huts, under a hundred, in close proximity to each other. Earlier they were made of dung and mud walls with thatched roofs, slowly being replaced with cement and pucca walls and roofs. By night with the advent of electrical connectivity, they (the Dhani) appeared as small pockets or clusters of lights. And when your gaze travelled across the breadth of the land, it looked astonishingly beautiful, like god had spilled a pot of diamonds and precious stones on a dark carpet and instead of individual stones, a few each had huddled together as groups all across the carpet. I can only describe it to you as best as I can since unfortunately I only had my phone camera, which was incapable of capturing this beauty. As I gazed at this, I felt that this is how it would have looked when Kannagi broke open her bracelet in front of the king and out spilled rubies on the floor….

The tale of Kannagi is from the Tamil epic Silapathikkaram, traced back more than 1500 years ago to the days of the Pandyan rulers of the temple town of Madurai in Tamil Nadu. Kannagi was a woman who was married to Kovalan, a wealthy merchant and they enjoy a blissful wedded life. In his travels, he comes across a beautiful dancer Madhavi who entrances him with her beauty and grace. Forgetting his duty to his wife, he spends more and more of his time with Madhavi, at the cost of his wife. Kannagi is perturbed with his now regular unexplained absences, his aloofness from her and the vanishing money. She sends her hand maiden to follow Kovalan, who reports back on his affair with Madhavi and him splurging all his wealth on her. Kannagi is heartbroken, distraught at her husband’s infidelity and then finally incensed at being treated thus and she confronts Kovalan fierily. Her now penniless husband realizes his mistake and promises to make amends. Since he is penniless, Kannagi offers her anklet made of gold, for him to pawn and help kick start his business. As he tries to pawn the anklet, an overzealous jeweler reports to the king that the Queen’s missing anklet has been traced. Promptly the royal guards arrive and take Kovalan into custody. When brought before the King, Kovalan pleads his innocence but the King is unmoved, especially since the Queen recognizes the anklet to be hers. Kovalan is ordered to be killed. When news of this reaches Kannagi, she rushes before the King and challenges the verdict passed on Kovalan. The King dismisses her pleas of her husband’s innocence. This enrages Kannagi and she seizes the anklet and breaks it apart. And out pour rubies and scatter across the floor. She now mocks the Queen since the Queen’s anklet was filled with pearls. The King, ashen faced at this turn of events summons his Dewan, but it is too late, Kovalan has already been done to death. On hearing this, Kannagi is overcome with grief at her loss and enraged at this miscarriage of justice and curses the King that Madurai would be burnt to ashes……

Kannagi breaking the anklet in front of the King

I have seen Silapathikkaram as a dance drama and though when Kannagi broke her bracelet in the drama, rubies did not spill out as I had imagined, I did see them, on the earth, when flying in the skies above that dark and clear night….

Of Forks, Knives and the dessert Spoon. (My first day the National Defence Academy)

            Imagine a young adult, just out of school, leaving home, literally forever, having chosen a life in the armed forces, something neither he nor his parents had any clue about. Well that was me in July 1991, when I left to join the National Defence Academy. This was the first time I was going away from home and I was going away kind of forever. The entire train journey from Bangalore to Poona, I was immensely sad with the thought of leaving home and wondering if I did the right thing.

           

            So, very apprehensively I got off at Poona Railway Station with a Trunk, a bedroll and a suitcase wondering what lay ahead. I struggled in the twilight to find the lone and huge “Shaktimaan” truck waiting to transport the cadets to Khadakwasla (I was joining about a week late and hence the usual arrival formalities of reception at the Rly Stn had already been wound up). It was already late and dark by the time we reached NDA and the Truck driver after conferring with the authorities on the telephone literally dropped me and a dozen other fresh “lambs to the slaughter” in front of a huge stone building which had the alphabet “F” emblazoned on a red and yellow rectangle.

            Having been abandoned in front of this building, we were wondering what to do, when a stocky and authoritative person came out, dressed in a Khaki suit, wearing a cap like the NCC cadets did and barked some instructions at us, which many of my fellow travelers seemed to understand and instantly started complying. Anyways, with a bit of help from my new found course mates, we lifted our entire luggage and were given temporary shelter in “F Squadron” for the night. Just as soon as we set our luggage down on the top floor of the building, there was some commotion and we heard footfalls of all the cadets of the Sqn (Squadron) doubling (a kind of a trot- I was later to learn) and so we joined them as the entire Sqn assembled back in front of the Sqn building where we had been unceremoniously dumped about an hour earlier.

           

             It was easy to spot the “First termers”, since we were the only ones wearing “Muftis” (a dark trouser, white shirt and tie combination), everybody else wearing the Khaki “Walking Outs”. We all were huddled at the head of a long column of 3’s and doubled off, god knows where. Between huffing and puffing, I asked another 1^st termer, where we were going and he looked at me with panic and hissed “The Mess and don’t talk”.  And then we crossed a broad avenue and saw a majestic building, long and low, lit strategically to outline its shape, in front of us and this entire snake like column of about 150 cadets doubled up to its entrance. The entrance to this building was a large, grand set of steps leading to a porch supported by columns. As we doubled up the driveway to this building, I happened to glance to my right and I saw two aircraft parked ceremoniously at the entrance, one with wings folded (this was called the “Academy Namaste” I would learn later).

            

As we formed up column after column in front of the mess, it reminded me somewhat, of Roman soldiers forming up in movies like Ben Hur and the like. I was somewhere in the front in my Sqn’s column and there in front of us were (obviously) some senior cadets lounging on the steps, some seated, some standing and they kept calling us “freshers” in turns. I was summoned soon enough and questioned of my name, school, whereabouts and my regional affiliation. In those days, my Hindi was terrible and the moment I answered the questions in Public school accented English, stating that I was from Bangalore, there were hoots of laughter and some derisive remarks “Yeh loh Bhai ek aur Yank ka Chodhha…” (no clue what it meant then). When they finally lost interest and let go of me, I turned around to return to my Sqn and horror of horrors, they had vanished. There was NO ONE and the whole area in front of the mess was EMPTY.

            I had a major panic attack, and just blindly ran into the mess. At the entrance I was faced with a large area, full of wood paneling and ornate columns, with large chandeliers, full of big tables placed in a rectangular fashion, but nobody sitting at the tables, though there was some important looking chap hanging around. I looked to my left and right and in both directions till as far as I could see, were the heads of cadets, all standing at their tables behind their chairs. I had just met a few of my coursemates a couple of hours back and wasn’t even sure I could recognize any of them in this sea of faces. I had ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE where to go. As I helplessly and desperately looked left and right, the important looking cadet walked towards me menacingly and growled, “You, just Fuck off from here”. I reacted like someone had whipped me and took off like a jack rabbit to the left. I couldn’t spot a single soul who looked familiar and quickly gave up and started looking for an empty place at any of the tables.

           

               I finally found one at the end of the mess hall and quickly sidled up and stood behind a chair. The cadet adjacent to me looked at me in annoyance and asked “Who the fuck are you and what the fuck are you doing here??” (expletives seemed to be an integral part of communication in this place). With an air of desperation I pleaded with him to let me stay, explaining my predicament to which he reluctantly agreed. There was some commotion and some one seemed to make an announcement, similar to the call of a muezzin and shortly after, everybody sat down. The table was already laid with food, with a dinner plate and a smaller plate (a quarter plate, I was to learn later) to its side, which had two cylindrical cutlets. There was a fork on the left and a knife on the right, a glass of water on the left and a mug of milk on the right completed the ensemble. Along the table were placed plates stacked with bread and bowls filled with cabbagey kind of stuff as well as some liquid. I saw people helping themselves quickly to the food and so did I.

            I took 2 slices of bread and put it on my plate and helped myself to the cabbage and the liquid. The liquid was actually  a kind of stew of black eyed peas (lobia, I learnt later), rather runny to be honest. I looked all sides and I could see the cadets using their knives and forks with great precision and efficiency. They placed the bread on the plate, cut it into smaller pieces with the knife and fork, shoveled some lobia onto the fork and smoothly transferred it to their mouths. Now, though I had a public school education, I came squarely from a middle class Brahmin family, where we ate with our hands and the highest level of sophistication was using a spoon. This knife and fork was like Greek and Latin to me and had me flummoxed. I carefully watched the cadet across the table and I copied his actions to perfection but I just could not get the lobia to stay on the convex side of the fork, come what may.

             We were already about 10 minutes into the dinner and not even a morsel of food had entered my mouth, while food was being consumed at a fantastic rate by everybody around. In fact, people had finished and were beginning to get up. In desperation, I broke a slice of bread lengthwise and dipped it into the milk. As I did that the cadet next to me hissed “Bhen Chodh, What the fuck do you think you are doing??” I felt this was not exactly the right time to correct the senior, that I had no sister and instead pleaded that I could not use a fork and knife because I had never eaten like that before. I do not know whether it was my pleading or whether it reminded him of his first few days at the Academy. Whatever it was, he waved his knife at me imperiously and bade me to carry on. And that’s how my first meal at NDA and my first brush with the knife and fork was…..