હરિહર ભટ્ટ

Harihar Prannashankar Bhatt was born in Saurashtra in 1895, took his degree in Bombay, and taught school in Akola before Gandhi’s movement pulled him in — he marched in the Dharasana salt satyagraha and served eighteen months in prison for it. He is remembered for a single poem. એક જ દે ચિનગારી, published in Kumar in 1925, entered the Ashram Bhajanavali sung at Sabarmati and then the school prayer of every Gujarati child, which is a strange fate for a verse about not being answered. His other life was stranger still: Bhatt was a serious astronomer, who taught the mathematics of the heavens, founded an observatory in Ahmedabad, edited the Sandesh almanac, and sat on the committee that reformed India’s national calendar. He wrote five volumes on celestial computation. The man who asked God for one spark had spent his career measuring the fires of the sun and the moon, and knew better than most exactly how far away they were.