Staring at the Sun...or not.

The scene is Friday afternoon, around 2:45pm and I'm starving. Flew in from Delhi that morning on a budget-flight empty stomach, and now it's full-day meetings... which wouldn't be a problem except today happens to be a solar eclipse - and the longest one this century (which sounds melodramatic, I know... longest in a decade!)

So what does this have to do with food? As I'm learning, Indians traditionally do nothing during the solar eclipse, as anything that happens during the eclipse is considered "bad" and inauspicious. Parents pleaded some of my colleagues to stay home that day... and barring that, certainly not to eat until after 3:48pm, when the eclipse was set to end.

When I asked about it, I received some scientific-like answers like: "there's more radiation during an eclipse, which is obviously very bad for you." (I was hesitant to tell people I went up to our roof to get a first-hand look at the eclipse, lest people think I'd spread the radiation around!) Yet when I kept digging deeper, common answers were much more mythological in nature -- Hindu mythology blames eclipses on the demon Rahu, who is variously depicted as a snake or a dragon, who swallows the sun.

Whatever it is, it certainly led to a much quieter Hyderabad, which was apparent even in the low-traffic ride to work that morning. Reading about it online, "Indian soothsayers have warned that pregnant women should cover the windows and stay indoors, lest the dark forces associated with the eclipse deform their unborn children." I've even heard about doctors (though not in our hospital) who help women delay labor to avoid their children being born on such an unlucky and inauspicious day.

An editorial in "Times of India" chides Indians for turning "the beauty that awaits us in the universe" into a day of fear: "It's fear that drives us to fast during an eclipse lest the mal-influence of the sunless period is ingested with the food."

I'm just grateful that it appears my company's senior management has no such fear associated with the moon passing between the sun and earth. While we tried to be accommodating to our IT partners in the meeting with us (all five of whom would not eat or drink until after the eclipse ended), thankfully we decided to break for lunch.

Back in the board room and tummy sufficiently stuffed, I couldn't help but think how ironic it was -- half the room being IT engineers and impressively versed in the "hard" sciences, yet this same half still starving (as could be seen by their constant looks to the clock as it inched towards 3:48pm) -- based on avoiding "inauspicious" activities during an eclipse. In fact, I heard that the fasting doesn't actually end here... it ends AFTER you take a bath to cleanse yourself after the eclipse has ended. Learning about all this, I gained more insight on a newspaper headline I eyed earlier that day: "Why the eclipse is wasted on India."

I once had a college professor who was an eclipse chaser -- sometimes class would be cancelled because he was off to Egypt or Asia to see an eclipse or some other amazing celestial event (which could probably only happen because this was the longest-running course at Harvard). I can only laugh at the clash of cultures that was bound to have happened on any of his eclipse trips to India.