What Was and What Could have Been…

It starts about a week before 29th and my frantic campaign for Earth hour is about a week old. In a few days I have managed to rope in over 55 people who have pledged their support to Earth Hour and a massive chunk of it has come from Ruhi terrorizing people over the so-easy-to-reach-out-medium, a.k.a the internet. I am really looking forward to the 29th and for some odd reason fantasizing that my 55 person outreach will result in a complete blackout of New Delhi and I will be somewhere at Central Park witnessing the day I played John Galt.

This pretty little bubble is burst when my office (SPACE) calls and says I have to go for an overnight observation with school kids to a far far away land, commonly called as a dark site by optimistic astronomers on one day of the week. Yes, 29th March 2008! As I cry to myself, “can things get any worse?”, a mail pops in my inbox. Apparently things can always get worse. AAAD has just declared an observation on the 29th for the purpose of describing deep sky objects. This is something I had been looking forward to since Nainital and will now have to miss.

What can be the probability of three events synchronizing themselves at the same time? The eternal skeptic is now seriously wondering if God exists. This seems nothing short of divine mischief. So after many rounds of bending rules, persuading people and evil thinking I manage to shift my SPACE observation with kids over to someone else, move the AAAD observation venue to match with my office observation venue and execute the Earth Hour plan at the observation site with all those school kids instead of the ignorant New Delhi citizens (the grapes are sour).

Another week of planning and campaigning and it is 29th March. Earth Hour 2008. The day begins well with a chat on a few radio channels about Earth Hour. So I’m thinking, cool a few more people know about this now. Late afternoon, I am all set to leave for Nuh, which is the far far away land in question. I am getting calls and messages from the angels that my friends are, each generously wanting to pick me up. So as flattered as I am, I still haven’t figured out how I eventually got picked two hours late. When Shubham at the helm of things and a steering in hand eventually got to the highway, we were at Nuh in no time with a large AAAD group waiting for us.

The plan was simple… on paper. We (Shubham, Ruhi, Jiya, Apoorva and I) take a look at the AAAD observation site, come back to a school where the SPACE students are put up for their observations, execute the Earth Hour plan, and join the AAAD group soon after. It turns out, God does exist and he does not like my plan. The AAAD observation site turned out to be this half an hour ride on a terrible, terrible piece of road. So as Shubham drove, frustrated as hell, avoiding overfilled tractors and meteoric potholes, his car had a few wounds to show. Anyway, one hour of agonizing drive later, we were at the SPACE school where the kids were waiting for me to take charge.

So a last minute scramble for candles and it was 8 pm. As the lights went out and the school plunged into darkness, a glow started rising on the ground as the candles started being lit. Twenty minutes of the meeting and the kids were overjoyed to be part of a global movement. Earth Hour 2008 was turning out to be better than I had expected. As Ruhi stepped up to take a few pics (the ones you see in this blog) the little angels had turned into an army of charging devils with torches in their hands. So much for the “awww” comments.

With the end of Earth Hour, our minds were back at the AAAD observations. Didn’t want to miss the fun of observing once again through the mighty beesinchi/usb. But that didn’t happen either. With the responsibility of packing food for the AAAD group, we were stuck in the school till all the kids finished their dinner first. Then Mr Malik, the Chairman of that school insisted we have dinner with him and started discussing “things” which will be left out of this blog for reasons that will be left out as well. Worth mentioning is one incident, when Mr Malik propped by the desire to show us the true dark sky, called up the electricity board and got them to switch off the lights of the entire town! Whoa! Now thats a first.

Two hours late, and as we are about to leave, we have been blessed with yet-another-flat-tyre. We have made this a regular feature of our observations with the count being three out of three so far. Shubham is steaming and as we eventually reach the AAAD site, we are welcomed by a surprising view. The beesinchi/usb is vacant. Everyone is just siting, doing nothing. Turns out, the sky conditions are bad and no observations are possible. Agggghh!!

Shubham and I eventually reach out for a can of soda that had seemed to be fermented due to the intense Delhi heat! Wonder how that happened? Anyway, we didn’t have much choice and had to drink it without complains. The girls joined in with some fruit juice (and Jiya with some cough syrup) and thats pretty much how the observations went.

A view of a blinking satellite/space debris seemed to be the highlight of the night with everyone waiting for it to blink occasionally. Every time it blinked, there were shouts of “hua” (Hindi for “happened” for those who might be less privileged). That was the name of that object since then – Hua.

It was a night of if-only and would-have-beens. As we returned the next morning, we had learnt nothing more but had proved the existence of the law of averages. Fingers crossed for the next round.