Diary Page 15/9/2019 (My dear Luna)

Today, in the fury of reading everything there is to know about ISRO, I was struck by a very righteous question and subsequently got hit by the right answer. At the very least I feel that it is right. Also watching the movie “First Man” didn’t hurt either. I learned about the various missions we have undertook and how after facing extreme peril won over them, or won them over. I learned about the feelings of the entire nation after the “95%” success of Chandrayaan 2 as I too was in the flood of feelings when at 2.1 km above the surface of Luna, we lost our Vikram and Pragyan. The constant efforts to establish communications with it will continue till 21/9/2019 after which its lifespan will end. To the curious, that will be because of very little heat protection, the sun will literally fry the wiring in the instruments, rendering it obsolete. After that, as everyone says, we shall move on.

We have come a long way from INCOSPAR in 1962, and since the formation of ISRO in 1969, exactly fifty years from 2019. And the exponential graph of our beloved ISRO may and shall forever rise. It is the great force of our brilliant minds, that we are able to push through these literally insurmountable odds. It also tells you about the epicness of scale of the human brain. Whatever we have set our mind to, we shall achieve. ISRO became a source of immense inspiration for a billion people on the fateful day that Chandrayaan 2 had lost contact with the lander module. A beautiful question arose, how did the failure result in such a cohesive force for good?

I always believed that whatever the odds, the hero has to be the one who wins, or else he is not the hero. At 2:30 in the night when I was picking up my jaw from the floor, when the chairman of ISRO announced that the communications were lost, I was truly heartbroken. I was constantly praying, hoping for a turn of events that never came. I was feeling lost. How does it feel to watch your heroes fall? The people who you know that can and have achieved brilliance have failed. Being selfish as I am, I could not bring myself to feel pity or remorse for the scientists, because I was too busy feeling pity for myself. Have I chosen the wrong heroes? I deeply respect intelligence. True intelligence is extremely attractive to me. And these men and women of this organisation are just that, and they still failed? The end speech of the chairman was a quiet nod to everyone watching at home that it was time to go to sleep. There would be no news till the press conference the following morning. I switched off the TV and went to sleep. I obviously could not. I lay in my bed thinking, that I had maybe made a mistake in valuing intelligence as a virtue. Maybe I had over estimated its strength. I didn’t know on what levels of analysis was the mistake made. What did the error signify? Was India an incompetent country? Were Moon missions worthless intellectually? Was my being an Indian a mistake? A flood of such silly questions filled my mind. I picked my phone and scrolled and scrolled forever looking for a positive beat. Eventually, many people came up and wrote in support of ISRO. “We are with you.” “Proud of ISRO” “#ISROisbae”. What were these people, cheering for? We had just seen, or rather not seen our lander not land. What were these people lauding ISRO for? I quickly inferred that this was all just pity. Pure unadulterated pity, and it was going to lower the pedestal of ISRO and by extension heroes, to a lower level. Heroes are never wrong. That is why you try to be like them. You can be wrong, but you path tends to a hero, mathematically speaking. Even if you cannot achieve the high ideal you set, you at least work towards it. But this was just painting on water. I scrolled further and the snowball grew, more and more people filled the internet with ISRO. They were all praising ISRO, and at the same time, lowering their bar for ISRO. It is not okay to fail. If that is what is taught everywhere then we are in deeper trouble than we care to admit.

Eventually, a time came, when I finally ripped the band aid, and wiped my tears for ISRO, and went to sleep. I didn’t want to miss the address of the PM on the issue, even when I could have successfully predicted every word he spoke. He wouldn’t speak against ISRO, or even nudge in that direction. No person told ISRO to do better next time. Everyone was just saying, the mission was not a failure. This mission made everyone question their definition of success. I too had jumped the bandwagon and wrote a pretty tweet about it, but it was in hidden tones and deeper meanings. Accept the fact that you failed. Do that with some courage, that is what keeps your integrity intact. I understand rush of emotions all too well, but those tears when they came out of the eyes of the Chairman, all the eyes of the country went dry. What is the lesson the children will take from this? It’s okay to fail? If all that mattered was the fact that you tried, but couldn’t achieve, then there would be no difference between the ones who did achieve it and the ones who couldn’t. This downplays the victory achieved in the past missions that we have been successful at. It was fine that you tried, there was no actual need or desire to succeed. Just trying was enough. This is me dabbling in sarcasm for those who didn’t get it.

After letting it fester and putrefy in my dirty brain, I was neck deep in conspiracies, that maybe the reason for the failure was China or even worse NASA. Maybe they couldn’t bear to see India succeed in something they had burned millions of dollars for. I was even pulled into the eddy of the case of Stuxnet. Or maybe it was the great NASA itself. Maybe her highness, could not bear to see India succeed. There were american payloads on the lander that crashed, so what could be better than to hide suspicion than from becoming the victim itself? But I quickly pulled myself up, before it could entirely devour my head. I inferred that even if there were internationally envious entities at work here, we could not still stop it. Failure to protect it from sabotage is still a failure. But not to dwell on it for too long, I turned my head to another monument.

I saw that millions of Indians were all congratulating ISRO and overnight people became its fans. I also enjoyed the banter between Indians and pakistanis. But the most elusive thing I saw was the love for ISRO went beyond the boundaries of states, religions, castes or any other carefully laid but equally silly walls. The Vikram of India, and the Pragyan of India, had sacrificed themselves for the unity of India. There were no cultural dissents while praising ISRO. It was more unanimous than the love for cricket. I sat back and saw in wonder how a failure, literally pulled everyone together. If the aim of Chandrayaan 2 was this, then it was a luminous success. If the aim was to get the youth to stay awake till it was 3 in the morning, without partying, then it was a success. Sure, the orbiter will function at least for a year before it is decommissioned, but the lander and the rover, shall forever lay on the soil of Luna bearing the flag of India and the Ashoka Chakra. But the intended objectives would not be satisfied and we have to live with that. I felt that my rant for the failure of ISRO was unaccounted for because I did not consider these ramifications. The thing about heroes that I told earlier was also false, because to choose them as my heroes was a decision I should have taken while considering their capacity to fail. I never chose perfect heroes. They could not be any different than rocks or water. A pot of water boiling at 100 degrees would be nothing different than these people who were never destined to fail. It was the people who failed and failed, but would not give up trying, were the heroes. It was because of this spirit that I chose them to be my heroes. My heroes would fail, but would come back with a fury that no one had seen before and emerge victorious. Then, their victory would feel even more sweeter and earned. ISRO had conditioned us to believe that it could not fail, and that is why when they did falter, it felt unfair. But discarding the fact that space and rocket is simply difficult, we knew they would not fail, not because it was easy, but because ISRO was upto the task.

It was nice to be reminded that I was, and everyone was still human. A few mistakes are allowed to everyone, even the stars twinkle every now and then.