NEW DELHI, JULY 3: Nostradamus's prediction about the imminent end of the world scheduled to occur before Sunday is done may have sent the Japanese into jitters. But Jammu's best-known star gazer Pundit Dwarka Nath Shastri will have none of it. He does not want some medieval French coot to clutter up his astral orbit.States Shastri, doomsday will indeed take place. But not on July 4. It will mark the end of Kalyug, and Kalyug happens to be a comfortable 26,000 years away.This should give some breathing space to all of us who have equipped ourselves with gas masks, protein biscuits and toilet-paper rolls to wait out the visitation of Old Nostra's `King of Terror'.Chandigarh's best-known astrologer, P Khurana, is also slightly dismissive of Nostradamus. ``After all, he is not an astrologer, only a prophet,'' he observes.But what is it about Nostradamus that can stir up such passions on a global scale, five centuries and more after he himself has passed into the mysterious reaches of the hereafter?Well, for a start, he was there before the other loonies the clairvoyants and the chaos theorists, the Apocalypse-now placard holders and the chicken-lickens of the world appeared.While the Hindu Kalyug and the Christian Apocalypse came wrapped in spiritual packages, Nostradamus rode into the future on riddles. Very convenient this proved to be. Since these riddles could be interpreted in a hundred ways, it was almost impossible to prove him completely wrong.Rajesh Kochar of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore, suggests a simple way out of the dilemma. ``Wait until July 4 and if the world doesn't end, you can draw your own conclusions.'' But even astrophysicists knows that it is a mug's game trying to get the better of seers and their ilk. ``Our continued faith in astrology only proves the desire of the human race to have an umbrella over it,'' says Kochar, adding that the only thing he has strong objections to is the attempt of these seers to pass off their visions as a science.InPune, Somak Raychaudhury, a faculty member of the Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, has little time for the Nostradamus-struck.``He made these predictions much before the law of gravitation the only force that the planets exert on us became known to human kind,'' he explains painstakingly.Simi Garewal, the Mumbai-based TV personality, finds all this Nostra stuff downright funny. ``Why didn't he make any happy predictions?'' she wants to know. For Dev Anand, the hype is difficult to stomach too. ``I've never been to an astrologer in my life and now they want me to believe all this,'' he exclaims. But rational argument does not always work. Two months ago, astrologers came up with an elaborate doomsday theory. Because of a certain alignment of the planets, they argued, disaster would strike India on May 8. In places as far apart as the Alang shipyard in coastal Gujarat and in Chamoli high up in the Garhwal Himalayas, the fear generated by this prediction was palpable.The factthat nothing happened on that particular date is no guarantee that such predictions will not be made or that they won't be believed at some future date.As H L Mencken put it so well, faith may be defined as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. And in a world heading into the maelstrom of a new millennium, in a world where an estimated 330 million people suffer from depression, in a world where six million copies of Nostradamus' prophecies have sold, the occurrence of the improbable is always a distinct possibility. However, in case it helps, we have it on the excellent authority of Mumbai's famous astrologer, Bejan Daruwala, that the world will go on after midnight. Says he,``Nostradamus was a great man. But the best of us can go wrong and so can Nostradamus. The world need not worry, it will be safe for now.''Now, if Nostradamus can go wrong, so can Daruwala!With Ruchi Sharma and Vijay Singh in Mumbai, Davinder Kumar in Pune, Sheba Thayil in Bangalore, Priya Yadav inChandigarh and Vipin Pubby in Jammu
