Look
again at that dot. That's here. That's home.
-Carl
Sagan
For once, Murphy should forget me.....
I
have never been a great planner. I live concentrating fully on the next step. There are exceptions when I do plan well ahead,
and for me this came in the form of another travel.
On
brushing across the advertisement for my research related conference in Istanbul (COSPAR 2016), eighteen months back, I knew I
had to be there. When the time for submission of abstract came
forward, I diligently submitted (two) my abstracts (20 min before the
deadline passed!), applied for financial support, which was a big deal since I had, for this phase, exhausted all my channels for international travel support
from funding agencies. And I waited..
Of
course soon, things worked as planned. Both my abstracts were
accepted and I was granted a full paid trip to Turkey. I got my visa
on time, booked tickets (and hotel) at great prices, slogged day in
and out for completion of the research work(s) that I was supposed to
present there and waited for the day when I would leave...on my
birthday. There was no better way to gift myself, I knew it
and I chuckled. Things were going pretty smoothly for me. More often
than not, it was too suspicious to be so smooth but I cast those
thoughts aside. After all, for once it was quite possible that Murphy
forgets me..Alas he didn't!
“If
you perceive that there are four possible ways in which something can
go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for,
will promptly develop”. This
fifth way came to me just ten days before the date of my travel. I
woke up at 5 am that day, looked at the time and thought to myself
“ten
days to travel, can you finish your work? get that haircut? lose some
weight? buy a trolley?...I
dozed off. Two hours later, when I was back from my morning workout
and sipping a cup of brilliant tea, my dad comes to me. Hinged with
him, are his best efforts of trying not to look agitated “Things
are getting pretty bad in Turkey – all those firings..”
I
looked at him and said “Yeah,
but are you talking about France?”
“No,
you should come and see this”..
There
I was in front of a screen looking at my sleepless work-filled
nights, cancelled dinners, missed movies, my eighteen months of wait,
(not to mention so much of financial investments) evaporate away.
“Mmmmmm,
where is my cookie”?, I
asked mom. On the background was heard, “Turkey
on the brink of civil war, thousands of people....”
The
next few hours went away frantically, writing emails to the
organizers, sending messages to my friends, calling my travel agent
and undoing all that I had taken so much trouble to get done in the first place.
Everyone, except me (and my travel agent) seem silently relieved by my
cancellation. Amid every unfortunate happenings in
Turkey, this morning, it was not a choice. I was just left with no
option to go ahead. That morning I felt something that I do not
remember feeling anytime earlier – demented.
Obviously,
the current state of affairs today are not limited to the heartache
of a long-awaited but cancelled trip. People everywhere are demented perhaps. Unfortunately, as much as I try, I fail to
understand the necessity of much violence. Perhaps I am too simple-minded and
what is obvious, are not so to me. I don't obviously
understand
the importance of religion, colour, caste or any adjectives put in
front of a person. And along with it, I don't understand the
prejudice that these adjectives hold. I am ignorant and I am glad
that I am.
I
try to think of where we – as a human race - have failed what
resonates deeply in my mind are these words by Carl Sagan on
the photograph of Earth taken from Voyager 1 spacecraft:
“Look
again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it
everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of,
every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate
of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions,
ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every
hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every
king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and
father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of
morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every
"supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of
our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.The
Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the
rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that,
in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a
fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the
inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely
distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their
misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how
fervent their hatreds.
Our
posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have
some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this
point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great
enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there
is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from
ourselves.
The
Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere
else, at least in the near future, to which our species could
migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment
the Earth is where we make our stand.
It
has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building
experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of
human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it
underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another,
and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've
ever known.”
I
hope we all become ignorants too.
Image Courtesy: NASA/JPL
