This is about my recent visit to my hometown in Rajasthan. With my limited vocabulary I am not able to find the right set of words to describe my feeling. I was not only visiting my hometown after eight long years, but also I was about to visit rather stay in the house that we built eight years ago and did not get a chance to really stay there. I was surprised to see a lot more of open spaces replaced by houses (Bungalows), many branded stores but the same cramped roads, thanks to a lot more of traffic.
Cutting the long story short, what I want to discuss here is the feeling when I looked at the sky in the night. To my surprise it was full of stars, can you believe it? May be, you can but I couldn’t. I am not very sure if it was very stupid of me, feeling extremely happy after looking at the “Star-full Sky” (A sky full of stars!).
There may be multiple reasons for that. May be people in Bombay do not get the sufficient share of their sky-window to look at the stars. Or they do not just get the time to stare at the sky. OR they can not just find stars in the sky because of the pollution that Mumbai has and by the evening the atmosphere is covered under a thick layer of pollution that even if you want, you can not find a star. You can only see the moon because that is too bright as compared to the stars. The reason can be any or all of them.
After recuperating from the sudden feeling of joy, I realized that even the sky at that time was not really the sky I had seen eight years back at the same place. So may be the pollution factor is still there in this small city which in fact is one of the emerging industrial cities in Rajasthan.
Does that mean after that the visible number of stars are going to reduce with the time and only the more bright ones will be able to sustain the attack of pollution? Is goes by saying – it’s a cut-throat competition only the bright candidates will be able to manage it in the long run. If you are not bright, you can not be sight(ed).
Does it further mean that the stars in the sky will one day become countable? No longer will it be used as an example of countless by a poet, no longer it can puzzle a child trying to count the stars…… Just No Longer!
I desperately wanted to act like poet not because I love to, but because it is always the poet who pen down the unimaginable and in case this happen I wanted to capture the same.
Who knows that in the years to come “star-full” will become a frequently used metaphor.
