As the New Year dawns, it is a cause of celebration, and the renewal of hope that the next year will be one of greater peace, happiness and fulfilment for all the people who inhabit this planet.
On such occasions, I am reminded of the lines written in 1919 by Seemab Akbarabadi, also often attributed to Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal king:
Umr-e-daraaz maang ke laaye thei char din
Do arzoon mein kat gaye, do intezar mein
(I had asked for and got four days of life
Two were spent on wanting, and two in waiting.)
Most of our lives are illustrative of these lines. Years pile up on each other, and the four days of life are gone before one realizes, wanting and waiting.
A year for Earth is not even a drop in the ocean of cosmic time. Scientists estimate that the universe is 13.8 billion years old. The Sun, which is the centre of our solar system, has been in existence for 4.6 billion years. For the more than 8 billion people who inhabit our planet, and celebrate with exuberance the occasion of New Year, it should be a sobering thought to remember that we live on a minor planet of a solar system that is itself part of a massive galaxy called the Milky Way. Light travels at 299, 792.5 kilometres per second. The Milky Way is some 150,000 light years across, so vast that it would take over 26,000 light years to reach its centre. If it takes 365 days for the Earth to orbit the Sun, it would take our solar system 220 million years to make one revolution of the Milky Way!
While such distances already boggle the mind, amazingly, there are, at least, 125 billion such galaxies in the known universe, and each galaxy has about 200 billion stars, most of them larger than the sun! At the centre of each galaxy are the mysterious super-massive Black Holes, so dense in gravity that even light cannot escape from them. These Black Holes are million if not billions of times bigger than the Sun.
What is even more staggering is that this already vast universe is not static. It is constantly expanding, and that too at speeds approaching the velocity of time. This was the great discovery made by astronomer Edward Hubble in 1929. He did so by analyzing the colour spectrum of the galaxies he had discovered. The colour of radiant objects depends on whether they are moving towards or away from us: Blue, if they are coming closer, and red if they are moving away. Hubble discovered that most of the galaxies were red in hue, thereby proving that they were moving away from us. The example that best illustrates what is happening is that of a balloon with dots painted on it. If we blow up the balloon, the dots will move away from each other.
The universe is expanding in a similar way, and this assumes that there is space to expand into outside the universe. If not, the universe is creating space where there was none or cloning space. In fact, scientists—including the late Stephen Hawkins—do not rule out the possibility of multiverses, a cosmos where there are many universes.
If cosmology tells us that the universe could be infinite in scale, or certainly as close to infinity as can be imagined, what is the significance of our New Year? Our nearest galaxy is Andromeda, some 2.5 million light years away. Scientists know that Andromeda and the Milky Way are moving closer to each other, and in a few million years, will collide and annihilate themselves, creating a huge supernova, from which other stars will be born. Every day, the universe is witness to galaxies imploding, and supernovas being born. The Sun itself will run out of its nuclear fuel in a couple of billion years, and become a red dwarf, and with that our solar system will also come to an end. Our past, and future, are written in stone, and in between, like the blink of an eye. we are born and will die, without so much as a remote blip on the cosmic spectrum.
This is the ultimate existential and philosophical question that stares us in the face, as each one of us on this infinitesimal planet go about our lives preoccupied with our hopes, ambitions, aspirations and religious beliefs. In a Brahmand—as our ancient sages had the insight to call the universe—what, after all, is the ontological value of our less-than-puny lives and the tumultuous events that each year brings? Do we matter at all, and if so for what purpose? Ghalib speaks about the sheer dispensability of our lives:
Ghalib-e-khasta ke bagaiir kaun se kaam band hain
Royie zaar kya, kijiye hai hai kyon
(What work will stop if Ghalib is no more
Why lament so much then, and grieve so profusely.)
But it is not my intention to be so despondent. However vast this cosmos, and however insignificant our lives are against its canvas, life is a precious gift to be enjoyed every minute. So, on this happy note, let me wish you once again, dear readers, a very Happy New Year!
Pavan K Varma is author, diplomat, and former Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha).
Just Like That is a weekly column where Varma shares nuggets from the world of history, culture, literature, and personal reminiscences with HT Premium readers
The views expressed are personal
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