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Journalism of Courage
Some time during my middle-school days, I got hooked on to astronomy. The attraction of the world of heavenly bodies was so irresistible that I was often sent into a hypnotic trance while gazing at the sky. Naturally, my family was more worried than impressed. But nothing would deflect me from this idiosyncratic pursuit. So, they left me to my astronomical chase.
From the rooftop, I would keep looking at stars and planets, trying to capture the vastness of whatever universe I was privileged to see. During the day, I would be lost in books, looking for rare information. In a short time, I had a nice compilation running into a few notebooks, with an array of pictures and graphics. The most prized one was a Marathi translation of Einstein8217;s theory of relativity, of which I actually understood little. But such was my passion that I wanted to know anything and everything about astronomy. One of the fallouts was I lost touch with friends. But the august company of Galileo, Copernicus, Aryabhatta, Kepler, Fred Hoyle, Gamov, Naralikar et al kept egging me on. Galaxies, nebulae, comets, black holes, pulsars, dwarfs and twin stars were my constant companions.
The logical spin-off of this was that I lost all interest in studies in the crucial school-end year. Later, setting off for college, I used to wander with friends, mostly visiting the theatre. Movies, with their dreamy content, provided an ideal departure from my grave existential crisis.
Naturally, my academic career took a nosedive, never to take off again. This secession from the make-believe world did take its toll. I stood isolated. The demands of an earthly existence started telling on me, with the result that I couldn8217;t be comfortable with anything. It led to the realisation that one cannot be a part of what one construes as a virtual non-reality, and still not come to terms with it. In this realisation lay the seeds of a rethink that was to put an end to this tormenting crisis.
Little did I know that the answers lay in my astronomy notes. One day, while nostalgically rummaging through those dusty notebooks, I stumbled upon a chapter which discussed an ironical fact of geometry about straight lines. Any straight line we draw is actually a part of the earth8217;s spheroid and is hence not straight in the strictest sense. But for all practical purposes, it serves well as a straight line.
Isn8217;t life on earth comparable to this dual reality? Like the line deemed straight, it is locally meaningful and yet part of the larger, infinite reality. Ever since this cosmic truth dawned upon me, I have been able to relate myself better to the compulsions of being an offspring of Mother Earth.
