GUNTHROAT

Today morning at 6.21 IST India’s lunar mission launched off from Sriharikota. In a fortnight’s time it will reach an orbit of 100km from moon and starts sending pictures from there. An Indian flag will also be placed on lunar surface. It would be a moment of glory for the 1 billion people in our country. In today’s morning news every politician and general public were showering praises on Indian space scientists who provided us with this grand spectacle. I was laughing at these hypocrites who only recently were mocking the space scientists and questioning the very significance of Indian space programme.
I am proud of being the son of a person who worked for 35 years in ISRO. A person who has seen all the vicissitudes of the now raved Indian space programme. We should understand when we hear ‘’you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand it’’ that rocket science is one of the most complex professions in the world. I have a dim picture of our journey to trichur where my father was mocked by our relatives for the failure of missions he was part of during the late 80’s and early 90’s. I am amazed now to recollect how stoically he used to take those deprecatory and sometimes extremely insulting comments, quite unlike me. Some used to ask how the mission to sea (rather than space) is progressing (sarcastically indicating the fall of rockets to sea after the failure). Some of these people where highly enraged for spending the exchequer’s money on such futile exercises. Now I see these people talk using mobile phones and see saas bahu serials on satellite television, the same people who questioned the need for space programme in a poor country like ours. People who appreciate and applause Indian space programme have no right to do so if they have atleast once mocked these hapless scientists who just saw their years of toil go down in the sea. My father and his friends used to work sometimes till 4am in the morning during the final preparation for the launch. It would have been heartbreaking for them to see their experiments failing after such hard work. And then what we as a nation did rather than console them at those moments were to mock them, to insult them and worst of all to suspect them. I can’t wait to see the headlines in the leading daily (the most circulated yellow daily in India) in Malayalam praising Indian scientists for their great achievement. The insidious designs of this newspaper to place their well wishers at the top and at thus create more profit is well known. The newspaper invented the infamous isro spy case intending to expand their circulation by giving a bond movie like pot-boiler involving scientists, honey traps and spies from Pakistan to the general public who were already suspecting space scientists for their apparent failure to ‘deliver’. The case went on for years and finally Supreme Court declared all the scientists accused of espionage innocent and let them off with compensation. The case which saw the resignation of then Chief minister of Kerala( from which he never recovered) was actually concocted by a group of politicians to serve their vested interests. But in the process they nearly destroyed the space programme of this country. Some activists who had opposed the setting up of space station can still be seen in the front of protest marches against atomic power stations and dams (which Nehru had described the temples of modern India). The Indian scientific community had the courage to overcome these challenges which included a lot of import prohibitions from western countries (which didn’t want India to progress) and make every Indian proud before the world.
Today is my father’s birthday. He contributed the prime of his life for the country, in ensuring it to develop as a pioneer in space science. Let God give him good health and more years to see more and more successful launches. Happy birthday achaaa........
October 22nd