सूर्य का संक्रमण
संक्रांति, उत्तरायण, और 30 मिलियन डॉलर की सर्दियों की पर्यटन उद्योग जो ड्रूइड्स ने नहीं बनाई
हिंदू साल सिर्फ जनवरी के चारों ओर नहीं, बल्कि सूर्य के दो महान संक्रमणों के चारों ओर बनाया गया है। तिल और गुड़ का लड्डू, आकाश में पतंग, और गंगा संगम में नहान - ये सभी एक ही अनुष्ठान हैं, बस तीन अलग-अलग पैमानों पर। वेदांग ज्योतिष ने छठी शताब्दी ईसा पूर्व में उज्जैन में संक्रांति के अवलोकन की प्रणाली को कोडित किया था, स्टोनहेंज पर्यटन से दो हजार साल पहले। लीवी 2006 और वेहर 1998 ने मौसमी प्रभावी विकार के अनुसंधान के माध्यम से इस तंत्र को सिद्ध किया।
भोर में तिल-गुड़ का लड़्डू
A kitchen in Pune, on the morning of 14 January 1996. A grandmother, age sixty-one, in a green nine-yard saree, has been awake since five. On the steel counter in front of her sits a stainless steel thali with two hundred small round laddoos, each the size of a marble, made of roasted white sesame seeds bound with melted jaggery. She has been rolling them since six. Her hands are sticky. Her granddaughter, age nine, has woken up and is watching from the doorway, holding a kite the size of her own torso.
The grandmother looks up, hands the granddaughter a small steel bowl of the laddoos, and says, in Marathi, til-gul ghya, god god bola. Take the sesame and jaggery, and speak sweetly. The granddaughter repeats the line back, mouth full of one laddoo, and runs out to the terrace where her father is already untangling the manja for the kite.
The day is Makar Sankranti, the Hindu festival of the sun's crossing into Capricorn. Across India on the same morning, several hundred million people are eating a sesame-and-jaggery sweet, flying a kite, taking a bath at a river confluence, lighting a bonfire of last year's wood, or performing a tarpana for ancestors. The grandmother in Pune is not thinking about the Tropic of Cancer, the Vedanga Jyotisha, or seasonal affective disorder. She is thinking about whether the laddoos will hold their shape until lunch. She is also performing the most astronomically precise civilizational festival in continuous practice anywhere in the world.
What Sankranti Actually Is
Sankranti is the Sanskrit word for the sun's transit from one zodiac sign into the next. The word breaks into sam (together, completely) and kranti (a stepping-across, a revolution). The sun makes twelve such crossings in a year, one per month, and each is technically a sankranti. But two of the twelve are the festival-grade events: Makar Sankranti in mid-January, when the sun enters Capricorn (Makara), and Karka Sankranti in mid-July, when the sun enters Cancer (Karka).