**********************************************************************************************************
Glare is what obeys the rule:
"The more light you pour into the eye the less it sees"
There is nothing strange about it...what you want is more light on what you wish to see rather than on the eye itself.
Even that is not entirely true. In our school we had this piece on the first conquest of Everest. With photos of Hunt and Hillary and Tenzing. And they were all wearing those snow goggles.
When Black and White TV arrived at KGP in the 1970s, it was all fun. KGP was on the edge of reception from Cal and we required lots of sky-high antennas installed on our roofs. And there was no remote. When Hum Log or Wimbledon or Mohun Bagun-East Bengal were on, there were crowds in the darkened TV rooms. And the owner of the set had to sit beside it and constantly adjust the knobs of Brightness and Contrast to quell the mobs.
The human eye is a delicate and fantastic instrument. The pupil of the eye is said to expand or contract as required by a factor of 12. I read stories that when Rutherford presided over his celebrated alpha particle scattering experiment he used to hire students by the hour for counting all those point scintillations that were happening on the screen in the dark room. Apparently there was an anteroom into which the student was shepherded and asked to wait in the absolute dark till his pupils expanded enough to see all he wanted to see there.
But of course cataract is a spoilsport.
Five years ago I was traveling in the front seat of a taxi beside the driver on the highway between Vijayawada and Hyderabad in the afternoon. The route was due west and my seat had no visor sun shield. And the afternoon sun was hitting my eyes plumb. And I found that I was completely blinded by the glare and dazzle. It was all light and no trees or road or traffic ahead. But it was painless. It was then that I saw that my cataract was maturing.
If you are an old man driving your matchbox Maruti on the highways of Hyderabad, it is easy for you to measure the progress of your cataract. For a city of its population, ours takes the cake for the highest number of road accidents in the night.
That is because no car in Hyderabad has its headlights covered or painted or protected by a Polaroid film. And everyone thinks he is a mastan and drives like blazes with his headlights on the high-beam. I guess it is competitive chicanery. Like each monkey trying to jump higher than the other.
There was a time when I was comfortably driving in the night on the busiest stretch between Khairatabad and Secunderabad via Begumpet. As time passed I was getting stymied by the incoming headlights of Innovas full blast. And in India we drive right-handed cars. And my right eye was the worse off. So it became a struggle stopping every minute and inching and getting honked and howled at by drivers behind. So I stopped night-driving on busy streets but managed otherwise.
And one night I was tailing behind my son's new Tata Indigo on a dark night and found that I was getting blinded by even his brake-lights.
And one early morning I decided to drive from our Chandanagar to Secunderabad...a stretch of about 10 kms due East on a road that was then overlaid by lovely trees. And the trip turned out to be hilarious. When I was driving on a treeless stretch the rising sun was blinding me and when I was driving in the tree-shade the darkness was doing its stuff...
Blinding glare is the classic symptom of cataract. Light falls on the eye lens that goes opaque. And what the retina sees is the glowing lens itself rather than the objects lit ahead of it.
Anyway a time came when I couldn't drive at all in the nights or early morning or setting sun...pity.
And that was when I agreed to be taken to the famous LVP Eye Institute in Hyderabad...a story I told earlier:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2011/09/1-something-vision.html
***********************************************************************************************************
Glare is what obeys the rule:
"The more light you pour into the eye the less it sees"
There is nothing strange about it...what you want is more light on what you wish to see rather than on the eye itself.
Even that is not entirely true. In our school we had this piece on the first conquest of Everest. With photos of Hunt and Hillary and Tenzing. And they were all wearing those snow goggles.
When Black and White TV arrived at KGP in the 1970s, it was all fun. KGP was on the edge of reception from Cal and we required lots of sky-high antennas installed on our roofs. And there was no remote. When Hum Log or Wimbledon or Mohun Bagun-East Bengal were on, there were crowds in the darkened TV rooms. And the owner of the set had to sit beside it and constantly adjust the knobs of Brightness and Contrast to quell the mobs.
The human eye is a delicate and fantastic instrument. The pupil of the eye is said to expand or contract as required by a factor of 12. I read stories that when Rutherford presided over his celebrated alpha particle scattering experiment he used to hire students by the hour for counting all those point scintillations that were happening on the screen in the dark room. Apparently there was an anteroom into which the student was shepherded and asked to wait in the absolute dark till his pupils expanded enough to see all he wanted to see there.
But of course cataract is a spoilsport.
Five years ago I was traveling in the front seat of a taxi beside the driver on the highway between Vijayawada and Hyderabad in the afternoon. The route was due west and my seat had no visor sun shield. And the afternoon sun was hitting my eyes plumb. And I found that I was completely blinded by the glare and dazzle. It was all light and no trees or road or traffic ahead. But it was painless. It was then that I saw that my cataract was maturing.
If you are an old man driving your matchbox Maruti on the highways of Hyderabad, it is easy for you to measure the progress of your cataract. For a city of its population, ours takes the cake for the highest number of road accidents in the night.
That is because no car in Hyderabad has its headlights covered or painted or protected by a Polaroid film. And everyone thinks he is a mastan and drives like blazes with his headlights on the high-beam. I guess it is competitive chicanery. Like each monkey trying to jump higher than the other.
There was a time when I was comfortably driving in the night on the busiest stretch between Khairatabad and Secunderabad via Begumpet. As time passed I was getting stymied by the incoming headlights of Innovas full blast. And in India we drive right-handed cars. And my right eye was the worse off. So it became a struggle stopping every minute and inching and getting honked and howled at by drivers behind. So I stopped night-driving on busy streets but managed otherwise.
And one night I was tailing behind my son's new Tata Indigo on a dark night and found that I was getting blinded by even his brake-lights.
And one early morning I decided to drive from our Chandanagar to Secunderabad...a stretch of about 10 kms due East on a road that was then overlaid by lovely trees. And the trip turned out to be hilarious. When I was driving on a treeless stretch the rising sun was blinding me and when I was driving in the tree-shade the darkness was doing its stuff...
Blinding glare is the classic symptom of cataract. Light falls on the eye lens that goes opaque. And what the retina sees is the glowing lens itself rather than the objects lit ahead of it.
Anyway a time came when I couldn't drive at all in the nights or early morning or setting sun...pity.
And that was when I agreed to be taken to the famous LVP Eye Institute in Hyderabad...a story I told earlier:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2011/09/1-something-vision.html
***********************************************************************************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment