Chasing the aurora

The experience of seeing the northern lights is Surreal and magical, and 2024 is likely to be the best year to get a glimpse

- Anita Rao Kashi

It is near midnight and the silence is imbued with a special quality. Much like Shakespeare's "quality of mercy" (in The Merchant of Venice), it seems to drop as "gentle rain from heaven". A wall of glass that provides stunning views of the  undulating north Finnish countryside by day is just a yawning abyss of almost black nothingness at night.

In the distance towards the north, a few gentle hillocks form darker silhouettes against the sky speckled with stars.

Just as it starts lulling you into a sense of time standing still, the sky above the hillocks turns almost imperceptibly soft green and before me is the most glorious of all celestial shows-the northern lights or aurora borealis.

The light glows faintly, swirls and pulsates a bit, surreal and ethereal. And then it all disappears, the whole thing lasting just a few minutes. If not for a bad picture, it could have been a figment of my imagination. It is a far cry from the spectacular videos sent by friends, which I watched with envy. And yet, even though muted and ephemeral, the experience is surreal and magical.

For all its spellbinding capacity, the northern lights are actually a violent event, the result of particles from the sun crashing into the earth's atmosphere.

2024 is predicted to be the period of peak solar activity in the sun's Il-year solar cycle, so there are far greater chances of witnessing the northern lights this year.