Eclipse III: Judgement Day?

There go the doomsday predictions again!

Apparently, since there is a triple-eclipse in July and August, there is going to be a disaster immediately following it. There is “historical evidence” for this and of course, in India, since we have the same two words “Itihasa” and “Purana” meaning both History and Mythology, we rarely, if at all, distinguish between the two.

How are people who publish books relating eclipses to disasters different from the people (whom I have seen only on American TV and movies) standing in front of malls and in street corners with a huge placard saying “The Doom is near” or “Prepare for Judgement Day”? I’ve not read the book nor do I intend to read it. I only read articles on what its authors said during its release but that was intriguing enough, in a sensational way!

Of course, the authors, as well as their Guru himself have warned that the book is, in fact, not a doomsday prediction but only a compilation of facts, but is that warning remembered? Only the sensationalism remains.

Back in 2005 sometime, I remember my cousin of mine; having sent an email to our cousins’ yahoo-group on why the world will end sometime in May because three moons of Jupiter are coming together in a line, a different kind of a triple-eclipse, (or was it the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn forming an Isosceles triangle?), followed it up with panicky phone calls!

So what would you do if the world was about to end? It brings to mind the conversation between a barman and Ford Prefect in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
“Aren’t we supposed to lie down with a paper-bag over our heads or something?”
“If you like”
“Will it help?”
“No. Excuse me, I’ve got to go.”

In the past ten days or so I have been at the receiving end of 3 different “factual” lectures and one email which came to my Dad’s Inbox, on why several disasters are going to occur and how one of those disasters is sure to be a Tsunami hitting one of the Indian coasts. This despite history never having recorded a Tsunami of such proportions between the hypothetical one that wiped out ‘Poompuhar’ at the turn of the Christian era and the one on Boxing day 2004 A.D.

One of them even went so far to say that seismologists have predicted the Tsunami! Wow! What giant geological strides have we taken in the last 4½ years which allow us to suddenly predict Tsunamis up to a month before they occur?

Ok, I agree that the Kurukshetra war and Rama’s killing of Khara-Dushana happened after triple eclipses as chronicled by Vyasa and Valmiki, respectively and even both the World Wars in the previous century happened after triple eclipses.

So do those examples mean that there are disasters after EACH triple eclipse? No, they don’t. There were two triple eclipses in 1989 alone. I don’t recall any huge disaster happening 1989, unless of course, you count my 12th std. Chemistry board exam or Michael Atherton’s Ashes series.

Oh, I almost forgot, there are going to be 6 triple eclipses between 2009 and 2020. So does the probability of disaster actually increase? No, it doesn’t, because there were 7 triple eclipses in this very decade - one each in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. Even Goldman-Sachs seems to have recovered from the only disaster to have followed.

How difficult is it to find disasters to fit the eclipses anyway?
1. 2000 – the dot com bust, Windows ME
2. 2001 – well, September 11th of course!
3. 2002 – floods in China
4. 2004 – The Tsunami, The Bush re-election
5. 2005 – Hurrican Katrina, Kashmir Earthquake, Bali bombings, IISc shoot-out
6. 2006 – West Bengal train accident,

Ok, that's enough: you get the drift. What I’m trying to say is that it’s damn simple to connect incidents. There was no triple eclipse in 2003, yet the Challenger blew-up and weren’t there any other natural disasters, accidents or terrorist incidents at all?

I don’t know if the 2001 triple eclipse occurred in September. I tried to Google it but only found someone selling their 2001 Mitsubishi Eclipse on Craiglist! Perhaps, we’ll all start using ‘Bing’ instead of good old Google! Now that’d be a disaster of some proportions!

That reminds me that the American automobile industry seems nowhere near a recovery from the eclipses of this decade! They’ve been eclipsed by Goldman-Sachs, BoA and AIG bail-outs, Madoff and Michael Jackson’s assets, The US Debt...

I imagine that somewhere in some unknown dimension, Surya, the Sun God (not the Jyotika-Surya Surya), Ra, Sol, whatever he has been called, Amonteph IV, his devotee, Karna, his son, the Moon God, William Shakespeare and Bhana (the biggest users of the Moon in poetry or what I know of it), Aryabhatta, Nicolas Copernicus, Bhaskara and Johannes Kepler would be meeting Douglas Adams over a drink, at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and having a good laugh about all this.

I’m not saying that there won’t be any natural disasters, accidents, political upheavals or terrorist attacks in 2009. I’m only saying that the proponents of this triple-eclipse theory will be ready to pounce on it when it occurs and will immediately connect the two events.

I have a book called “The Mayan Prophecies” which says that the World will definitely end on the 22nd of December 2012. That only means to me that the Bangalore Metro will never see the light of the day. At least for the CMH Road shop-owners, doom’s day is not near. It’s upon us!