Household concerns, cosmic vibes

So another admission session is more or less over, and I am all set to start yet one more seven-days-a-week work season again, which lasts till the end of November. I am wishing myself luck! This year I am a little extra bucked up, because the ICSE Council has prescribed Julius Caesar after a very long hiatus: 2011, in fact, was the last year they tested candidates on that text. I did JC myself for ICSE back in '79, started teaching with it, and now I guess I am going to retire with it. Nice: I like closure.

It's been raining off and on over this last fortnight, quite unlike in 2022, lowering the temperature briefly but repeatedly as it tries to soar beyond 37 Celsius, which makes life miserable. Last night, from latest inputs over the phone, I learnt that it was raining more or less simultaneously in Kolkata, Durgapur, Ranchi and Delhi. Don't know about the rest of the country. I love the rains.

Just finished watching the first episode titled Chasing Starlight of a new Netflix series called Our Universe, with Morgan Freeman doing the voiceover. Nothing factually new to me, but the commentary woven in with striking visuals - some real life, some special effects - was delicious to watch. Everything ultimately lives on and dies of starlight: that is the theme that runs through the narrative. The sun's energy absorbed by the grass, eaten by wildebeest in the millions, turns into vital energy in the mitochondria of Wa Chini the cheetah and her cubs on the vast plains of Serengeti Wildlife Reserve. They could have, of course, completed the circle by pointing out how Wa Chini when she dies will be eaten by bacteria and turn into soil, while that eternal indestructible energy is released back into the cosmos, to take new shapes again. They might also have pointed out that it is the same starlight which powers the worst of disasters, like hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. So it has been for the last three and half billion years, so it will continue for a few billion more. 

One cannot, unless one is emotionally very dull, help going all mystical over this. If at all any aspect of Nature has to be worshipped, it has got to be the sun, for it powers everything that we call reality - a true god, certainly (though not, I think, God). Hence jawakusum sankashang kashyapeyang mahadyuting... How strange that some of our rishis fairly anticipated much of the whole process purely through superficial (but long and methodical-) observation and meditation thousands of years ago: all our recent physics and chemistry and biology with their equations and tables, microscopes and telescopes and spectroscopes have only helped to fill in and confirm the details. 

But this is not where thought stops. What came before and after the sun, what before and after the universe itself? Oh, okay, the sun will explode into a Red Giant, then collapse meekly into an insignificant White Dwarf after a while, but modern science currently stops - indeed, prohibits asking such questions beyond the speculative Big Bang and Big Crunch: you cannot ask such questions about the Great Beyond, because space and time and causation themselves stop meaning anything beyond those singularities. However, Man will NEVER stop asking. And so some have suggested that there is God, from whom everything came and into whom (or which) everything dissolves: only to be recreated over and over again. So God is immanent in Nature, and yet above, beyond and infinitely greater than Nature: indeed, many religions have called identifying Nature with God, despite her vastness, power and complexity, the ultimate blasphemy. That is where the poet and the seer takes over: through a riddle, in the end, sagacity must go.

That is when the bhakta implores tuhu kaise Madhav, kaho tuhu moye (Tell me what You are, Lord) and only the Upanishadic sage and Sri Ramakrishna have said, 'I have seen the effulgent Being beyond death, the darkness and the void...' Who knows better?

And yet, and yet, the greatest of all miracles of creation is Man himself, for, so lately emerged from  animal  ancestry (if the scientists have got the story right) he alone wonders, and imagines, and creates, and keeps on changing the Reality around himself, not always wisely and well, but relentlessly, burning with the Promethean fire. Just a few thousand years - less than a blip on the cosmic scale - and he has gone from the Stone Age to the age of atomic reactors, computers, space exploration and artificial intelligence. So agonizing and insufferable, this existence, but all our wisest men have rightly claimed that of all births this is the most wonderful of all...