There had been whispers and giggles for the past hour but as Chandrayaan-3 began its vertical descent to the lunar surface, the room went silent and all eyes were fixed firmly on the screen. The projector visuals were a little blurry, the audio a little muffled, but the roomful of students and teachers burst into applause, cheers and hoots as it completed its soft landing. As students of Guwahati Refinery Higher Secondary School streamed out of the hot, packed room they had been watching the landing in, Ragini Sarma, a class IX student, was bubbling with excitement. “It was so good to watch it, it somehow felt like we all played a part in this landing in some way,” she said. “I am very interested in astronomy, and I really want to work in that field when I grow up. I have been following the news about Chandrayaan-3 since it launched, even though I don’t understand everything,” she said. After the Assam government ordered all schools to live-stream the landing, teachers at the government school put together their limited resources to screen it for their students. The school’s only projector was put to use, and students of classes IX to XII were asked to return at 5 pm after school ended for the day at 2:30 pm. But though only senior school students were called, Himangshu Dey, a class VII student, and four of his friends stood by the door of the classroom and watched with the older students. “It’s the first time we were going to watch something like this and I was very excited, so I took permission from the headmistress to come this evening,” he said. He said his science teacher, “Kaushik sir”, had been talking to him and his friends about the moon mission during classes and had also spoken to everyone about it before they had gone home after classes earlier that day. “I know this is something they have tried to do before but it was not successful, which is why it’s a big deal now,” he said. Kaushik Sarma, his 24-year-old science teacher, himself had stood at the centre of the classroom, watching keenly. “I got goosebumps,” he said. Because of his personal interest in astronomy and astronomy, he said that he had begun speaking to his students about the moon mission since the launch last month. “I had started with Chandrayaan-2 and explained what had gone wrong in simple terms. Before the success, I thought it was important that they understand past failures as well,” he said.
