Solar spectacle can't eclipse myths

ECLIPSED! The partial solar eclipse as seen from Chennai. (Pic: AP)

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New Delhi: Several parts of the country woke up to a partially eclipsed sun on Monday morning.

The solar eclipse began at 0600 hrs (IST) in India and continued till 0955 hrs (IST) when the moon's shadow finally left earth at local sunset at a point in the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska.

Temples across many states remained closed for over three hours. Thousands of devotees thronged Kurukshetra in Haryana on Monday to take a holy dip as the eclipse began.

The greatest phase of the eclipse with magnitude 0.876 occurred at 0802 IST at a point in north-west of Russia.

The celestial spectacle was also visible from much of eastern Asia, with the exception of the Philippines, Indonesia and Japan's Honshu Island.

Myths:

Pundits have quite a convincing explanation about the ill-effects of this phenomenon. "If an expectant mother ventures out during the course of this event, it will cast a very bad spell on the baby. There is even the possibility that the baby will be born deformed," Satish Chandra Sharma, an astrologer, claims.

Sharma has a long list of do's and don'ts for the solar eclipse. "You should not cut, you should not stitch and you should not eat. In dire distress, if you have to travel, don't go out without an iron knife," says he.

According to him, the best thing one can do during the eclipse is "to give away alms." "There is also the norm of bathing," he says.

And if none of this works, there's still way to ward off the evil. The snake charmers can do a special ritual to evict the dark forces from mother Earth. But the rationalists don't buy all this.

"First of all, there has to be education among the common people that these kinds of things are not at all dangerous. "It's a natural phenomenon. There is nothing to worry about," Sanal Edamarku, President of Rationalist Society of India, explains.

In spite of all these superstitions, this is one celestial phenomenon that most people look forward to.