Night!

 God said “Let night be”, and all was right! (apologies to pope)

When I look at the night sky in my village Kanamanapalli, only one feeling rises in my heart - of being blessed to have the opportunity to look at night sky in its (almost) natural form.

The night sky, for that matter night itself is much, much more interesting than day. It evokes myriad shades of feelings - of romance, lust, fear, curiosity and contemplation. That is - if you get to experience it.

In the current age, it is not only ‘Citi’ that never sleeps, but also cities, towns, villages, blocks - nothing sleeps! Even if they do, they do so in a totally artificial setting of glaring electric lights - from incandescent bulbs to LED lights, the amount of light in the night has exponentially grown. Since all these artificial sources of light glow in all directions, including upwards, we have a sky which is lit with artificial light blanking out practically all the stars, save a few. In fact, we can safely say that our children can see only evening star, which is actually not a star at all, but planet - Venus. (It is also the morning star sometimes, but current day children are in deep sleep at that time, having worked or played till late in the night 😀)

Overall this has the effect of cutting off of a very important aspect of our lives - the night in its natural form. The sky has become a dull and boring piece of black screen above our heads, which anyone hardly cares to look at, and if someone does, he can only see moon and a few stars with lots of uninteresting dull, grey sky. 

I grew up in Bangalore in 60s through 80s. Initially, the city used to go to sleep at about 8:30. The only prominent lights were street lights - mostly filament bulbs of about 60W. Their illumination used to be so poor, that there used to be a patch of darkness between two lamp posts. A few important roads had Mercury vapour lamps. When we looked up, we invariably saw lots of stars. In vacations, I used to visit my mother’s village Kanamanapalli which is about 100 KMs from Bangalore. It was not electrified and the dark sky was covered with millions of stars and when we slept outside, it was great feeling watching the stars and falling asleep.

Then slowly things changed - a scheme with very noble objective of rural electrification had its side effect of reducing dark sky regions. Initially, the rural electrical supply was so unreliable and the spread was so limited, the dark regions continued to exist to a great extent. But with advancement in technology and the increase in capacity, villages have also started almost “never sleeping”!

Fortunately, when I came back to my village after retirement, I found that there are enough regions nearby which are truly dark - lit only by stars and moon. It was such a “back to childhood” feeling, that I regularly seek out opportunities to venture into darkness and experience the cool breeze, the sounds of nocturnal creatures. Pure night has a charm of its own - the sky faintly glowing, silhouettes of the vegetation, and if you are alone the sound of your own steps, awareness of your breath, beauty of star studded sky…(and the ghosts in your mind also would surface 😀)

The overall effect is sheer magic. And it takes only a few LEDs or the loud music from an event nearby to spoil the show.

Well, does that mean we stop electrifying? Obviously, that isn’t the solution, but we should have the ability to get away from light when we need to. Things need to be thought of to achieve this. Almost 3 decades ago, I had read an article in Readers’ Digest talking about light pollution. It had mentioned that Canada was leading the war against pollution and had mentioned a number of measures out of which one thing in particular, I remember very clearly - designing all lights to only light the ground and not the sky. But after 3 decades, sky has been lit up even more - animals, birds and of course humans have been highly divorced from circadian rhythm. And the sky has become a dull grey roof above us. Therein lies the tragedy of future generatoins - who would totally miss a fantastic facet of their lives which was a source of beauty and inspiration for so many poets, scientists, philosophers. 

Meanwhile, I keep enjoying whatever opportunity I get and keep wishing that a solution would be found!