The night shifts are on in Rishikesh. Our first shot is taken when the moon rises behind a Shivpuri mountain in the evening and the last shot happens when it sets behind an old temple in the morning across the Ganges at 6.10 am. I savour warm milk and jalebis before going to bed during sunrise and the moon set. The junior artistes on set admire the film stars, while the pagan film stars admire the beauty of the celestial stars during the night, especially when you’re shooting in a small city, where the sky is clear.

COMMERCIAL BREAK
SCROLL TO CONTINUE READING

In such a scenario, the moon comes across as the master poet among the relatively dimly-lit courtesans. The master conductor who orchestrates the tidal metamorphosis. And strangely enough, this natural satellite gives fodder to the wanderlusts’ imaginations. Rafi saab’s Khoya Khoya Chaand. Jagjit Singh saab’s Chirag O Aaftab Gum or Savage Garden’s To The Moon And Back.

The moon has always been a part of filmdom, musicdom and far away from any fiefdom. The moon witnesses everything. Like have you ever had sex under the open sky during a full-moon night? Here it comes across as such a Peeping Tom, sort of a pro sleuth. May even form a halo around you in the missionary position. You may appear like God or a sex god to your girl. Don’t f**k it up this time.

Keep the tide high. Don’t defy the moon’s magnetic power. Be the life of the place you stand. Just like Saturn’s moon Enceladus. It has the traces of life. NASA says you may find aliens there. I sometimes feel that astronauts are anti-Sufi or anti-Rumi. They don’t believe in the journey within. Their journey is purely extra-territorial. My wife has spacephobia. She can never be a space tourist. On the other hand, I think it’ll be therapeutic to watch Earth rise from outer space.

And when you’re alone in that huge infinite zone, the inward journey is the only solution. That’s the place where the two worlds would meet. The outside and the inside. That’s the place where a lover of Neuton and Archimedes would transform into a lover of Rumi and shams of Tabriz. That’s the place you get to know how vulnerable you are as a humble earthling as your planet looks like a speck in the huge ocean of the universe.

Amidst this celestial buffet, we’ve only tasted the moon. We have only stepped on the moon. Moon phases and the moon’s orbit are mysteries to many. For example, the moon always shows us the same face, just like my heroines Parineeti Chopra and Bhumi Pednekar. Given a chance, they would live with their favourite left profile. Just like these distracting beauties slow you down, the pull of the moon is also slowing the Earth’s rotation, an effect known as tidal braking, which increases the length of our day by 2.3 milliseconds per century.

My dear wife Tahira, I’ve confessed to getting distracted by my heroines on this platform. In order to compensate for this recurring blunder, I would take you to Saturn this karva chauth. You don’t have to fast this time. Just have your favourite drink looking at me and the 62 crazy lovely moons through that perforated thing.