I have wanted to say this for some time but was too intimidated by the patriots in my midst. Now that I have thrown caution to the winds, I may say this with no fear:
I was 11 (would be 12 in August that year), it was the April of 1984, and we all huddled around the black and white TV in our home at the Air Force Station Palam, New Delhi. Sqn Ldr Rakesh Sharma, IAF’s blue-eyed boy, and India’s first (and at the time of writing this, only) astronaut (then called ‘Cosmonaut’), was about to speak to the then Prime Minister, Mrs.Indira Gandhi on the phone from space. That exchange is etched in the mind of every Indian man, woman, and child who was 6 years or above and had access to a television on the 2nd of April 1984. She asked him how India looked from space, and he, turns out quite memorably, said, ‘Sare Jahan Se Achha’ (better than the rest of the world).
I do not know why it did not fill me with the same pride as it did others that day, and why even now, it rankles. I have not known Rakesh Sharma (though my father did briefly), but if I ever got to meet him, I would most definitely ask him if he said it to please the dictator of India of that time, or he really felt it. I doubt if he really felt what he said. I have come to believe that it is impossible for an astronaut looking back at earth from 200,000km to think in the terms he claimed to have thought. He was probably pandering to the delicate sensibilities of a nation looking desperately for some validation that they indeed matter, that they are ‘someone’, that they are relevant. I very much doubt he felt any ‘patriotic’ feelings when looking at the blue Earth from orbit.
Recently, I have been thinking of how deeply Carl Sagan affected me, and how his ‘Pale Blue Dot’ was the beginning of what can only be called ‘a spiritual journey’, which led to extensive reading, thinking, and eventually to rationalism, and where my mind is today, still millions of light-years from where it can and (I hope) will be, but most certainly a distance, however small, from where I started.
I often tell my wife how I would love my yet-unborn children’s minds to remain curious, open, and inquisitive instead of slamming them shut with religion, patriotism, specism, sexism, racism, or whatever other xenophobic, exclusivist thought, and in the conversation, I narrated the story of how things changed for me one night looking up at the starry sky, when I realised how insignificant we are. It was then that it struck me how important astronomy is as a subject, and how our schools must teach it more thoroughly to our children, apart from evolution, in order to really give them a good start in life. It struck me how our education system more often closes minds and makes them unquestioning, and subservient to current ideas rather than keeping those beautiful minds the way they were born: inquisitive, curious, and forever questioning.
