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Magazine
RIPPLE EFFECTS
The night sky at noon
RANJIT HOSKOTE
G.R.N. SOMASHEKAR
Science, a way of participating in the outside world.
DO they never change, the landscapes that you left behind barred gates at childhood's end? You never find out, because you never go back; but sometimes, chance cleaves a rip in the fabric of time, and you return, a stranger. Last month, by some such unexpected turn of events, I found myself at the planetarium after an absence of nearly two decades. Was this the place where I'd spent summer vacations at the astronomy course, participated in science quizzes, dreamt of blue giants, red dwarves and radiation belts in the coolness of the darkened sky theatre, while Mumbai baked in the afternoon outside? The planetarium's dazzling white dome is no longer as solitary as it once was; the vista has been hemmed in by high-rises, and new apartment blocks have come up on what used to be a scrubland bordering a sludge-thick creek. Rows of cars crowd the parking space opposite: they signal the affluence that has flowed into this part of the metropolis, once situated at the edge of the mill lands, following its conversion into an alternative hub for the media, entertainment and lifestyle industries.
At first glance, though, nothing seems to have changed inside the planetarium. It's still enveloped in that unmistakeable composite odour of popcorn, air-conditioning, phenyl and smoke that distinguishes airports, government offices and official cultural venues in India (although the planetarium is, strictly speaking, autonomous of the kendriya sarkar). The plaque at the door reminds me that the building was inaugurated by Indira Gandhi in 1977, during the closing months of the Emergency. As she cut the ribbon and lighted the ceremonial lamp, could the Iron Lady have ignored the incongruity between the authoritarian regime she represented and this monument to the creative imagination, named for her liberal father? Schoolchildren are still bussed in by enthusiastic teachers: they still gape in wonder at the Martian and lunar dioramas, unchanged since they were installed, and at the Husain murals setting Neil Armstrong beside Vishnu mounted on Garuda. They still queue up at the mysterious cubicles that can gauge your weight on Venus or Pluto. I wonder how many of these children remember Mrs Gandhi, or have heard of the Emergency.
I enter a corridor marked "No Entry", looking for the director; as I file past the black-and-white portraits of Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, S. Chandrasekhar and other luminaries of postcolonial Indian science, a door opens in the panelling and I come face to face with one of my old instructors. He recognises me, after 17 years: the prodigal's homecoming. Later, I accompany him to the afternoon show, expecting the gradual pace of the shows of my childhood, the constellations winking on, the visuals following one another in polite sequence, to animate that inverted courtyard of stars rimmed by a cut-out of the Mumbai skyline. But something is amiss, something is missing. The large Carl Zeiss Mark IV projector, shaped like a cosmic ant from some 1950s science-fiction movie, has gone, leaving an emptiness behind. This was the core of the sky theatre experience for my generation: the pleasant, mildly unsettling sensation of rotating slowly around the universe, an illusion caused by the movement of the Zeiss as it sketched the night sky and superimposed slides on the hemispherical vault. The celestial visions are now generated by an invisible array of virtual-reality devices: the Digistar 3 system, its pace and sensory amplitude cued to the cyber-action movies. Constellations snap on, stars appear and vanish in sweeping zooms and wipes, the sky's a screen and you are immersed in it. I feel like a bioscope-watcher who has wandered into a cinema hall for the first time.
As children in the 1970s and 1980s, we sat here in silent awe, our eyes following the gigantic projector and its marvellous productions; the children who occupy the sky theatre's 612 seats today have never known the Zeiss, any more than they have Mrs Gandhi. Their magic appears from nowhere; they applaud every new special effect vigorously. It must be difficult for the children of the televisual epoch to imagine a time before colour TV, video, the PC and the Net. Our horizons of possibility were limited, by today's standards, but, for that very reason, the power to imagine was considerably greater: our colours were not boxed in the iconoscope, our textures not woven from phosphor dots. In a world where animation comics and science-fiction movies marked the limits of the bizarre, the planetarium was a launch-site for out-of-body experiences, a door to outer space, an invitation to the dramas of star-birth and heat-death. An expansion of the cinematic experience in a ritually powerful sense, it recovered for us the earliest human experience of looking up at the stars and planets, divining their connection with crops, tides and seasons. In the non-aligned, protected-market of the 1970s and 1980s, science was a way of participating in the outside world: in the darkness of the planetarium, you were inspired by a sense of unfolding possibility, felt involved in a larger enterprise of discovery. Pioneer, Mariner, Skylab and Soyuz were mantras, assurances that there were grander worlds to be known. Few discoveries that I make by hyperlink today, in the Net's inner space, can equal the first glimpse of sunrise as a slanting rim on an asteroid's horizon, or of a cratered planetary surface emerging from beneath swirling dust storms.
The white dome stands in the no-man's-land between the museum, on the one hand, and the circus, on the other. The planetarium, now in its 26th year and expecting its billionth visitor soon, knows it must contend with more compelling forms of visuality: it has digital cinema for competition in the era of the Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I left the sky theatre that afternoon with the rounds of noisy clapping ringing in my ears: the applause, charming at first, rapidly assumed an alarming pitch. Is the knowledge audience, too, being turned into a mediatic audience, alive to surface gloss but cold to substance?
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