When we were children, we used to occasionally see shooting stars. The last one I saw was a world famous one. It was 1997, February 28th, the Hale-Bopp. I was in Belfast for two months, at the Ethnomusicology Department, on the Charles Wallace Fellowship. I was heading towards my 40th birthday. I got to see the Comet, because I shared an office with a Phd scholar called Valeria, who was from Brazil, an oceanographer and a Historian of Science. We had gone to a music performance together, and then some Portuguese friends of hers, a married couple had invited me to dinner. At the end of the meal, they produced a Banoffi as desert. The recipe is to pressure cooker a tin of condensed milk, which in India takes half an hour to convert into nougat, but there it takes one hour. Thirty Marie biscuits are pounded under a newspaper and then crumbled with butter. Then baked in a mould at 189 degrees C for ten minutes.. The crumbs provide for a basket. After this, the nougat fills the centre, and bananas are sliced, and its baked again at 150 for ten minutes.
I shall always remember the shooting star with delight, standing in the cold, freezing really, and seeing the sudden splinter of colours in the sky. How quickly it vanished, with its long tails a sputtering or embers.
So all of August, went by with the surreal experience of storms and sea rising. El Nino arises again, the Amazon is burning endlessly, the winds are hot, the seas are rising, rain is falling, rivers are flooding, and meteors are crashing and we might all die, or some of us atleast. Whatever the context, we read the news everyday, a little dulled by the idea of extinction. When the question of escape arises, FB will inform us, as NASA has contracted to inform Americans, and we do share sites with a few American citizens.
The Nuer of Sudan in the 1930s, had memories which were linked to seasonal cycles, summer and the rains, since it involved territorial dispersion or nucleation. On the other hand, they had what E.E. Evans Pritchard called structural time, which based memory on events such as the last war with the Dinka, or the death of cows by rinderpest, or the coming of the British. So parallel memories are set up, providing a common narrative to those who understand the significance of these events.
The citizens of Eritrea maintain links with one another by maintaining blogs about their condition where ever they are. One can only say that the possibility that memory is maintained through electronic applications and surveillance apparatus makes humans ever less careful about documentation through diaries or letters. To think that Pliny left us a record of how he fled from the molten lava of Mount Vesuvius only to die in the end in the very circumstances he was escaping from means that we too will be left with legacies of the written word, and photographic evidence. For the rest, the smog hides the stars in Delhi, and we no longer see shooting stars of fire flies.
I shall always remember the shooting star with delight, standing in the cold, freezing really, and seeing the sudden splinter of colours in the sky. How quickly it vanished, with its long tails a sputtering or embers.
So all of August, went by with the surreal experience of storms and sea rising. El Nino arises again, the Amazon is burning endlessly, the winds are hot, the seas are rising, rain is falling, rivers are flooding, and meteors are crashing and we might all die, or some of us atleast. Whatever the context, we read the news everyday, a little dulled by the idea of extinction. When the question of escape arises, FB will inform us, as NASA has contracted to inform Americans, and we do share sites with a few American citizens.
The Nuer of Sudan in the 1930s, had memories which were linked to seasonal cycles, summer and the rains, since it involved territorial dispersion or nucleation. On the other hand, they had what E.E. Evans Pritchard called structural time, which based memory on events such as the last war with the Dinka, or the death of cows by rinderpest, or the coming of the British. So parallel memories are set up, providing a common narrative to those who understand the significance of these events.
The citizens of Eritrea maintain links with one another by maintaining blogs about their condition where ever they are. One can only say that the possibility that memory is maintained through electronic applications and surveillance apparatus makes humans ever less careful about documentation through diaries or letters. To think that Pliny left us a record of how he fled from the molten lava of Mount Vesuvius only to die in the end in the very circumstances he was escaping from means that we too will be left with legacies of the written word, and photographic evidence. For the rest, the smog hides the stars in Delhi, and we no longer see shooting stars of fire flies.
