One is that India has put its tricolour on the moon.
This I knew already. Yesterday I had received a lot of smses, hollering, "Be proud to be an Indian. Our flag is flying on the moon".
Reading the news now, I realise that it was not literally a flag, but something called MIP (Moon Impact Probe). It wass about 29 kg and the Indian tricolour was painted on all its sides.
(I don't think it will be popular to knock this achievement.) But is it not enough that we have polluted the earth? Now we are littering the moon!
MIP is a brainchild of Abdul Kalam. This is what Times of India says:
"Kalam's rationale for including the MIP was that since Chandrayan was orbiting the moon at an altitude of 100 km above the lunar surface, it would be worthwhile if India lands and makes its presence felt on the moon's surface.
He believed that if this was done, India could always make its claim to a portion of the moon."
I feel a bit dazed that we have crashed a 29 Kg object painted garishly on all its sides (no disrespect to our national flag, but let's be objective, that is how it will look to a Martian) so that the Moon itself feels the impact of our presence, and we can claim a portion of the moon when they cut it up some time in the future.
Where is our imagination? Or, is this imagination?
This is like reading about some idiot with a gun, who while coasting along the South Seas, saw an inhabited island and shot and killed the defenceless natives for fun. I think he intended to stake a claim on the island on behalf of the Crown or something...
But what is the point?
All that the MIP did, apart from staking a claim for a piece of the moon, is this: its video camera took pictures of the moon, the spectrometer began its analysis, and the altitude meter did what is known as ranging (I think all it did was show how low it was falling).
Yes, but what is the point? Do we know anything about the moon than we did before?
This me-too syndrome is a welcome sign, especially in children, because it is an indication of the competitive spirit. But in adults, it is pretty infantile.
Chandrayan is a great achievement, but this MPI is just waste, I feel.
Especially if you read down the page and come to the news item: "Lamps help Bill Gates' jet take off".
Apparently Bill Gates was in a hurry to get out of Jodhpur. But the Runway lights were not working because they were under repair. So what they did was to light up hundreds of kettle-shaped lamps with wickers and fueled by kerosene to guide him go away.
May be there is nothing irregular about it, or may be the runway lights failed (there are thousands of such instances of things not working), but it tells you how lopsided all this Science and Technology build up is here in India.
We are crashing MPI's on the moon, and then we also have powercuts for hours together every day.
I feel we lack imagination, there is no creative use of our intelligence. It is just me-too, me-too.
So we get to boast a lot about our achievements, but on the ground, there is no real, sustained development.
Water flows to a lower level but expands in all directions.
ReplyDeleteOn the face of it does sound like a waste time and resources. But then to explore, in future, on various space missions we may have to land something akin to Mars lander. It is easy to try and see how it is executed in Moon than try it for the first time when landing a prober is mission critical. May be it is Kalam's imagination that has resulted in MIP.
ReplyDeleteIt's not that we lack imagination but we don't care to imagine when it's not likely to benefit the self. Whether you land MIP or not, powercuts, bad roads, poor education infrastructure, untidy systems, poor public health care will continue as long as our politicians and bureaucrats remain corrupt, inefficient and power hungry.