A sunrise seems to predict how the rest of the day will be spent. One day you could be driving past wheatfields, looking on as the sun begins to disperse the light mist. The rising sun predicted a beautiful day which took us into wilds full of tigers and deer, birds and fish. I saw this sunrise in the Pilibhit district of Uttar Pradesh.
The next day you could be speeding along a highway at dawn, watching the eastern horizon light up, silhouetting a brick kiln at work. All night restaurants would soon switch off their lights and begin to prepare breakfast. This was a sunrise I saw in the Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh. As promised, the day was spent travelling, by road, by air, and then again by road.
Old and outdated ideas can be given a new lease of life in pop culture. The notion of the Norse god of thunder being a superhero on par with Spiderman, and Valhalla being as real as the arachnohominid’s New York is an example. (And there I put together words from two dead languages using a construction from a modern language!) If Norse mythology can be dragged into the 21st century, then why not the ancient mistakes about the nature of matter? But wait what really matters to most of us is not chemistry, but the texture of our lives. So here’s my version of the five elements, the ones that make up modern civilization.
The first, and the one illustrated by the featured photo, is of plentyfor a few. The fall of the evil empire at the end of the previous century gave us a new world, one in which we all freely love and embrace the notion that the word trillionaire is natural. It also means that we earn money mainly so that we give it to the few people who are described by that adjective turned noun.
The next has to be tangles. To live in the modern world is to deal with conflicting demands on us from work and family, or from driving and traffic. Having a smart phone in order to ease some of these tensions then leads to spam calls. Keeping in touch with friends conflicts with the rabbit holes into which social media algorithms lure you when you least have time.
Then there are crowds. Is there a part of modern life which does not involve crowds? Civilized life requires us to deal with crowds by developing the social skills of ignoring others: the averted glance while walking, the deep concentration on your phone when you are in public transport, the deliberate ignoring of conversation around you as you work in your wonderful airy open-plan office, the shouted conversations with your mates in a bar packed with others with their mates, and so on.
One cannot forget climate change, that rattle and clatter that you always hear at your back: the hot summers, the warm winters with sudden heavy snow, the hurricanes or bumpy flights. The constant humidity in the air or the clear and present danger of forest fires or floods are other symptoms.
The fifth element is coffee and chocolate cake, or other indulgences to make you forget the first four elements of your life. In another time this was called navel gazing or burying your head in the sand. Today it is the little bit of joy that you can squeeze out of living in a civilized world.
Sunrise and sunset must be the most popular subjects for photos in the world. That’s why it is interesting to drain off the golds and reds that make it so popular and try to find whether this is still the most beautiful time of the day. What do you think?
“You have to go to Sarangkot to see the sunrise when you are in Pokhara”, my nephew wrote to us before we left for Nepal. “I can take you to Sarangkot tomorrow morning”, the taxi driver promised us as we drove out of Pokhara airport. “When do you want to go to Sarangkot?” the girl at the reception asked when we checked into our hotel in Pokhara. It seemed kind of foreordained. So on our first morning after reaching Pokhara we decided to get it out of the way.
“No one promised you a rose garden”, The Family told me when I groaned awake at her three-in-the-morning alarm. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking an egg”, an obstreperous colleague had told me once as he winked at me. “You can’t depend on the weather in the mountains”, the driver told us as we set off in the darkness. In my half-sleep I couldn’t see the road as he drove rapidly through town.
At a parking lot in Sarangkot the driver indicated steps cut into the hill side and said “Now you climb. I’ll stay here.” We shuffled up, one of the crowd. “Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, and each man fixed his eyes before his feet”, wrote T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland, describing the climb perfectly. At the top of the hill someone had started building a viewing tower, and never finished the work. You had to climb it in order to get a view which was not obstructed by unfinished pillars and concrete beams.”What shall I do with this absurdity?” I asked, like W.B Yeats. “Climb”, said The ever-practical Family.
The bad weather had taken the life out of the party. “Not even the songbird of a cell phone chirped”, wrote Debora Greger. “There’s nothing we can do. Nothing.” I quoted Marie Howe and got a cold shoulder from The Family in reply. The gray turned rose eventually, and I climbed down from the tower to find a less windy spot. Clouds came and went.
The rose and pink turned to white and gold. “We’re off to see the weather, the wonderful weather of …” I hummed under my breath, trying to compress Sarangkot to a simple short syllable as we took the stairs down to the car.
We’d woken up and climbed uphill in the dark and found our way to the cliff overlooking Arthur Lake to wait for the sun to come up. The slightly overcast, foggy morning was bound to give a whole range of grays in a monochrome treatment, I thought. I wasn’t quite prepared for this effect though: the three bands of different shades across the picture. I’m still feeling my way through monochrome images.
Tolstoy’s answer was six feet. Let me change the question to how much land is available in Mumbai to each person. The land area of the island city of Mumbai is close to 68 square kilometers. The number of people in this area was last counted in 2011, and was 12.5 million. It may have decreased a little since then, but this number will serve. Take away a quarter of the city’s area for roads. That gives us about 35 square feet of space per person. That’s a rather small room. Take away another half of the land area for offices, and you decrease the space to 12 square feet. We begin to approach Tolstoy’s limit. What chance, social distancing?
In a place like this you learn to be alone in a crowd. You can spend a quarter of your life packed like sardines into a can called a suburban train, and live a complete life in the space between your earbuds. You can get off the train, walk home to your 35 square feet bed-sit, and count yourself a king of infinite space. But you may have bad dreams.
Which is why work-from-home is a wonderful idea. As long as you have a job which you can do over the internet, what is it really that brings you far from your family and friends, from that familiar place that you grew up in, to a crowded city like this? We discovered the freedom of the internet during the pandemic. Immediately after the end of the lockdowns, we began to travel during the week, working on a laptop that you could take anywhere that gave you a wifi connection. I saw sunrises over deserts and mountain lakes during this time. And I saw nomads even more adventurous than me: kayaking between meetings, climbing cliffs with phone and earbuds in backbacks.
What keeps us bound to these cities? The concerts and dinners, the art and the collegiality of the workplace can be sampled a couple of times a week. But I love to walk the streets of the city, alone, camera in hand, taking street photos. Would I be able to watch people in this way in any place other than a city?
Before the sun rises on you, high peaks would already see the sun above the horizon. The most ethereal light on mountain peaks comes at such times: when the rest of the world seems to be dark and fog bound, but one of the eight-thousanders looms over you with its snows painted red.
Kanchenjunga is perhaps the only one of these mountains which can be easily seen from several towns. We could see it many roads in Darjeeling. Still, the morning after our return from the Singalila trek, The Family wanted to follow the ancient tourist tradition of going to Tiger Hill for the sunrise. She had memories of seeing the sunrise from there. I only had memories of my mother talking about it. As it turned out, we had wonderful views. Even through my warm layers and cap, I was chilled by the wind. But I was glad to be there.
Viewed from Tiger Hill, the town of Darjeeling lies about half a kilometer below you. So after sunrise I could see the light creeping across the valley until it hit the town. It is a beautiful sight: the red sunlight on the town, and the gold and red sunlight on the 8586 m high peak of Kanchenjunga, with the rest of the landscape still swathed in the blue mist.
The sunset was pretty, even though the mountains were nearly all hidden in mist. You’ve certainly noticed this before: a little before sunset on a clear day the colour of the light changes towards yellows and reds. It’s the golden hour. And that gold transforms the mountain peaks, whether they are clear or hidden behind massed clouds. Fortunately, the only clouds in our sky that day were those clustered on the peaks.
As the afternoon progressed, The Family’s became more involved in the weather. All the moisture in the air seemed to be condensing on the line of the high peaks visible on the horizon. As the winds blew over them, the clouds would roll and shift, revealings parts of the massif for a few moments. The Family kept lamenting of the loss of the clear views we’d had of the Himalayas of Uttarakhand. Since the rest of the sky was absolutely clear, I didn’t think the clouds indicated a change in the weather. I thought this must be one phase of a daily cycle. The vapour drops to the valleys during at night, rising as a haze that blues distances during the day, settling on the cold mountain tops as clouds in the afternoon. At night, as the air cooled again, it would condense into valleys.
But as the clear afternoon light shifted to gold, I could not keep my trigger finger from the camera. The light was so good! Even through the misty haze I could spot those edges of cliffs and the folds of land which glowed in the light. A few more minutes, and the mountains turned to that pink gold which you see in the featured photos. I noticed then that the clouds were beginning to settle, falling lower and clear of the tips of the peaks.
The clouds continued to settle in the cold of the night. By morning they had condensed into dense banks of mist covering the lowest valleys. The views of the high Himalayas were perfectly clear. So clear, that I could sight for the first time the hump of a flank of the distant Nanda Devi (7816 m) behind the massifs connecting the Panchachauli (6904 m) to the range around Trisul (7120 m). The light was not the best, but the sight was unexpected from this far south.
At the beginning of Navaratri I watched the moon rise in the east through a thin haze of clouds. The atmosphere affects our view of the sky quite a bit. On the moon, the line of sunrise had just crossed the shores of the Sea of Crisis (Mare Crisium). The same sun that rises over the moon also rises on earth.
The next morning in Bera I watched the sun rise. The sky turned from black to red. And then, as the horizon fell away below the sun, the air turned blue and bright. On the airless moon will you only see the bright yellow sun pop over the horizon in an airless black sky? Interestingly, the sun creates its own drama as it rises over the moon. The solar wind kicks up dust in a narrow 150 km band around the terminator. Diffraction of sunlight through the dust will produce spectacular, albeit dimmer, colours. I can’t wait to see the first photos of the colours of sunrise from the moon.
Light breaks on secret lots, On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain; When logics dies, The secret of the soil grows through the eye, And blood jumps in the sun; Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.
—Dylan Thomas
How can you tell the difference between a photo of a sunset and a sunrise. One of the most popular classes of photos on instagram are these, but we depend on the artist to tell us which is which. I began to wonder if there is something intrinsic in the quality of light by which we can tell. Is there something to the metaphors of rebirth and hope or death and melancholy which are associated with these two daily events, or is it just a fancy?
I went through my old photos, classifying them into bunches: so many minutes before sunset, so many after sunrise, looking in the direction of the sun, away from it, or at angles to it. Then I measured the colours and luminosity. There was no way to tell by these visual cues which was a sunrise and which a sunset.
Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table
—T.S. Eliot
But it turns out that there is a subtle difference. It is not the sky that gives it away, but the earth. The temperature at dawn is lower than the temperature at dusk. This is most visible in winter, when the mist, if there is any, is thicker in the morning. In Mumbai, when it is seldom cold enough for the mist, the haze is worse at sunset, because the sea water has warmed through the day to saturate the air. If you know local conditions, you can usually use these other cues to figure out whether a particular photo you are looking at is from dawn or dusk. “Satisfactory,” as Nero Wolfe might say.
Don't hold your breath 
