When my father died over two decades ago my mother told my little niece her Dadubhai or grandfather had become a star. They stood on our balcony in Kolkata, looking up at the night sky and trying to find the “Dadubhai star”.
In childish euphemism, death was becoming a star.
I remember looking up at the sky the night my mother died this year. There was no need for childish euphemisms anymore. And it was just as well. The bright lights of the big city had long swallowed up the darkness. The night sky seemed emptied of stars. Only a handful were visible anymore. Perhaps they were not even stars, just satellites.
Beset as we are with many kinds of pollution, we hardly pay any attention to light pollution. It does not smell. It does not choke our lungs or our waterbodies. It does not deafen us. It hides in plain sight. Even I didn’t think too much of it until recently.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
At the end of August I went on a Kolkata Illuminated night tour. The Kolkata Illumination Project by a citizens group called Kolkata Restorers has been lighting up old heritage buildings for a while - massive colonial buildings that house insurance companies and banks, an old market, synagogues and churches and temples
TOUR SOUND
By day the buildings look imposing enough but the low wattage warm yellow LED lights make them come alive in a different way at night. They looked mysterious and beautiful.
A few weeks later in the run-up to Durga Puja festival I saw giant billboards spring up next to a park near me. They were LED screens. It felt like being surrounded by a battery of television screens flashing advertisements for leggings and cooking oil, the shocking pink, red, yellow neons screaming for attention. They looked garish and hideous.
The electric light bulb is indeed one of our greatest inventions. Having grown up with chronic power cuts, I have no nostalgia for the “pleasures” of trying to read by the light of hissing petromax lamps and candles. But there is such a thing as too much light at a time when our body clock tells us it should be dark.
Just as air pollution and water pollution are linked to a slew of diseases, light pollution can also wreak havoc inside us. A report in IndiaSpend cites numerous studies showing the connections between over-exposure to artificial light and health issues, stress and sleep disruption, reducing the production of melatonin, the hormone produced at night.
But when the Journal of Urban Management surveyed Indians aged 16-65 in 2022, it found 57% had not even heard of the term “light pollution”.
The most revolutionary thing about the Kolkata Illumination project is its steadfastly muted yellow lighting. Mudar Patherya, the moving force behind Kolkata Restorers, tells me many people, impressed by the lit up buildings wanted to do the same but they wanted bright DMX or Digital Multiplex Lighting with changing colours.
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And he would have to talk them down from it, telling them It would not look good on the building.
It’s a hard lesson to remember inn a world where the mantra for success has become bigger and brighter. Things of quieter beauty get short shrift. A city with lights galore is proof of India Shining as it were.
Yet darkness too is an old friend. Last month I spent a few days in a nature reserve in Thailand. One night we were on a floating raft house in a huge lake in southern Thailand surrounded by limestone karsts. The cabins were modest and powered by solar energy. There was zero connectivity anyway. The sunset was a stupendous blaze of orange and gold but as darkness fell, I wondered what we would do all night without phones and internet, just staring into the inky darkness. But as I sat on the deck overlooking the expanse of the lake, I realised if I looked up the sky was finally studded with stars. I was finally in a place where as Ray Bradbury wrote in I Sing the Body Electric, the lights could not diminish the universe.
I immediately wanted to identify the constellations and then realised to my chagrin that my star gazer apps would not work without connectivity. So we just sat there with beers, listening to the waves and looking at the stars we could nnot name.
And it suddenly felt as if those old stories we made up of parents becoming stars were not so foolish and childish after all.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for LAW