07/08/2026
Stargazing Experience . The moon will rise an hour late tomorrow.This is how simply the local people read the sky — a knowing so old it needs no instrument.
I’ve loved mathematics since school — distances in light years and parsecs, the brightness of stars in magnitudes. But it stayed theory. Models. Observatory visits.
Then, down with Covid while Kaner was being built, I found myself with nothing but nights — and a clear desert sky. For the first time, I wasn’t reading about the stars. I was looking at them.
That reignited something. A year of astronomy led to astrology, and both led to myth — and I found the real joy in the crossing.
Now this is what the star-gazing sessions at Kaner hold. We begin with how the sky once told people the weather, the time, the way home. Then the stories — how watching the sky, long before any telescope, became a science of its own. The Big Dipper, for instance, is Saptrishi here — seven sages pointing toward Dhruv taara, the pole star. A pattern remembered because it was never just a pattern. It was a story.
An hour after dinner, on the rooftop, chamomile tea in hand — wondering, together, where we are in all this.
Samir Bhatia - Co- Founder, Kaner Retreat
Star Trail Image by Dr Udhbhav/ Photographus Indus
