John Narayan Parajuli

The sun is no ordinary object, we all concede. But its “extra-ordinariness” as the most dominant celestial object often fades beneath the monotony of its “rise and set” eternal convention, or so to say. It blazes right from the morning and sets long before we go to bed. A “perfect-time manager,” the sun has continued to inspire modern man to act busy and morbidly time-conscious even when they are not.

The famous Canterbury riddle is a testimony of man’s desire to imitate sun vis-à-vis its velocity: how fast can I travel, if I start with the sun and finish with it? One could only imagine that the riddle master must have been a wishful thinker to equate his or her velocity with that of the sunlight. This was a long time before the Wright brothers were even conceived. There is no clipping the wings of human imagination.

The sun is the source of life on earth. It has inspired inventions, literary discourse and continues to do so. The sun as a part of nature is a better painter, artist and all the professions that human mind can ever conjure up. Nature often depicts itself into such incredible and picturesque sights and scenes that are too elegant even without impressionistic paintings. It was an ordinary day, except for Maoist affiliated Revolutionary’s “give and take” bandh gimmicks.

No celestial extravaganza, it was, but what I saw was at least a painters’ vision come true. The sun resembled a half moon silhouetted behind a thick veil of cloud. Then it manifested as a splash of golden tinge doting the dark backdrop. It belittled Picasso’s paintings. It was Francis Goya’s “Execution of Madrilènes,” Tintoretto’s “Last supper” flamboyantly painted for just a moment by one heck of a painter: nature.

Dark clouds may be a meteorological phenomenon, but as a shade of colour in the painting in question, they were symbolising something else. Perhaps the clouds resembled the overwhelming presence of antagonistic forces in the world today; their cruelty, savagery, excesses and prudery.

It must also have been reflective of diagnostic sketch of Nepali and global ills.

Like the golden splashes in that particular painting, our “Sun of Democracy,” though semi-eclipsed, is not yet out.

In nature, atmospheric changes are ephemeral. Dark clouds disappear too quickly for the sun to shine bright again joyously. But in larger than life canvas, things are never easy or stunningly so quick to draw even a far-fetched parallel with nature, let alone an identical one.