That picture of the Milky Way is from the internet, but the scene in the sky on that night I walked up the hill with my grandmother was uncannily close.
The night sky gives us perspective, and perhaps the reason why “uneducated” village folk like Panikkar, who taught me what the word equanimity truly means, was one of the wisest persons I have met. Never in the 50 years that I knew him did I see him lose his cool. Despite living marginally poor he always had a laugh in every sentence. He once said to me on the way to a night time Kathakali performance, “People should pray to whichever god that gives them comfort, because whether we pray in mosques or temples or churches during the day, when the stars come out at night we know that we are all the same”.
Although stars have disappeared from the skies, they appear rather magically in city planetariums, and none perhaps more magnificent than the one at the Museum of Natural History in New York, where I went once on a journey that started close to Ayodhaya and brought me back to earth a few minutes later – literally and figuratively as this video demonstrates.
If people really did have an opportunity to look at the stars like this, wouldn’t believers of Ram consider that he was perhaps just a young prince and “a model human being” at best, at least until the late 1970s, before he was suddenly transformed into a God in the public imagination fueled by desperate political forces. If so, was he worth all that trouble for a temple where he was supposedly born?
We might consider that the Navagraha’s in Hindu texts, refer not to the universe as science tells us, but only to a few small adjacent dots next to earth , which are but “a mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam” in the cosmic sky.
If the stars remind us that we have truly no idea why we are on this tiny planet, we just might set about enjoying our short time on earth and getting along with everyone.
Perhaps this simple truth is lost on most people because most people do not see the sky laden with stars anymore- pollution and the glare of electricity have taken care of that. Star gazing has been reduced to a boutique travel experience that takes you to the few corners of the earth where you can still see them.
