I Knew Eclipse Was a Shadow When Most Others Thought it Was Rahu’s Revenge on the Sun!
This post appeared in the Under the Lens column of RaagDelhi web magazine on 27th December 2021. It is being reproduced here, with minor modifications. I am Mitabuddhi. I lived in the city of Kusumapura (कुसुमपुर), the capital of the Gupta kingdom. The great Guptas’ empire was in decline, yet the kings followed the tradition of patronizing scholarly activities and giving high regard to those engaged in the pursuit of knowledge. Narsimhagupta was on the throne during my adulthood. It was 1500 years back. Though my colleagues in the gurukul gave me this demeaning epithet of being a dullard, what makes me proud is that I was one of the disciples of Acharya Aryabhata. He was not a spiritual thinker or a saint, but he was venerated as much as them due to his erudition concerning physical sciences, mathematics and astronomy. Being an ordinary student, I seldom met him, but all of us knew about his spectacular accomplishments in these disciplines....