July 22, 2009 was supposed to special. If you were to witness the longest total solar eclipse on this day then indeed it was special. So we, a bunch of colleagues, made a full proof plan of not missing the iconic event by driving down to Valsad, a place in Gujarat from where the eclipse would be seen in its totality!The first dropout was announced when Amol was diagnosed with chickenpox on the previous morning. Un-excusable excuse! (What a healthy kid he must have been not to have those as a kid! I mean, it never really occurred to me that chickenpox was not kids-special disease..) So we tried finding if anyone else would want to join our madness and Ashok almost said, why didn't you tell me in the first place. So far so good.
Then halfway through the day, I was told to attend a meeting in Chandigarh. WTF! Dharmesh gave me an ultimatum to manage to cancel it. I even tried but without any success.
A 6.20 AM flight added some exotic hope of catching the heavenly sight of total eclipse in the air. So here I am, at the airport, at 5.30 AM, watching beginning of eclipse on the news channels and waiting for the boarding announcement but it was my mistake if I expected the flight to take off on time.
So after the flight took off a few minutes past half past six and after quite a few minutes when the clouds got cleared all I got to see was what you see in this picture.
By the way, I now hear that most parts of Gujarat were all cloudy during eclipse time and those who watched the eclipse on television were the lucky ones! The chances we were willing to take were well not taken then!!
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