Reaching out to the stars

I was changing wallpapers on my Windows XP desktop today when I happened to see a wallpaper of the moon in the collection. Memories flew back.

Since I was a child, science always fascinated me. I used to feel a lot of excitement in understanding how things work, and what principles lay behind them. Perhaps one of the reasons for the scientific outlook was the several “Tell Me Why” books which I used to get on my birthdays at home. An avid reader, I used to read all the science in those books from end to end, fascinated about science, technology and engineering. This left a lasting impression on the mind of a small boy.

An integral part of any such scientific books used to be spectacular images of the universe. Of planets like Saturn, the moon, of deep sky objects in fantastic colors.

Visiting Nehru planetarium once in a way with the family was one of the things which added to the awe I already held for the heavens above.

The science of the stars, planets and the universe had me completely hooked. I was in love with the stars and I was thirsting for more.

I read about Galileo, Newton and his telescope, and so many other great men who made the science of the stars called Astronomy possible. I learnt about the importance the stars in the sky held in the ancient world and how the constellations came to be as we know them today. The importance of the pole star in ancient sea journeys, the relevance of the Orion constellation to the ancient Egyptian civilization. The role of Venus is ancient fertility rituals in Egypt, and in ancient Mayan and Chinese cultures.

Astronomy, combined with the knowledge I gained on the ancient world proved to be a very powerful and potent tonic for my mind back then. All this science opened up my mind and left an impact of a life time. It shaped the very way I would see the world, not just the way I would see the world, but also religion, spirituality and God.

The part that fascinated me the most was that the universe and everything in it had a minimum age of billions of years and distances were considered normal to be in millions of light years. This concept of vastness, distance and age was something I could not identify with anything I saw on earth. I developed a deep and great respect for the universe and nature.

When I entered my teen ages, unfortunately things at home were not so easy that I could ask and get what I wanted. One passionate fire I had in me was to graduate to some real science and buy a telescope for myself. However I had no clue if one was available in India, and how do you go about looking for one. The desire about star gazing burnt inside me wild.

A universal law of the spiritual world states “When You Are Ready – The Master Appears”.

One day I was reading the Sunday Mid-Day that I happened to see an article about an aging Parsi gentleman called Keki Medhora and his passion and love for Astronomy. The telescopes he owned and how he spent most of his now retired life gazing at the sky above from his residence at “Station Terrace” building in Grant Road.

This was my moment of truth. I begged my dad to atleast take me to Grant Road to meet Mr. Medhora. After a lot of cajoling he agreed one fine day to accompany me to the gentleman. A hop and skip away from Grant Road station we finally arrived at the doors of Mr. Medhora. He warmly welcomed us and made us comfortable in his home which had an array of small telescopes lined up as show pieces more than anything else as they had served their purpose down the years in his life.

It was evening and a half moon was lazing in the sky. That was the moment when he called us over to take a peak from the best telescope he had – an 8” reflector telescope with a wide field eye piece. It was the first moment in my life that I would actually peer down a telescope eyepiece and see the heavens. He fine tuned it and asked me to take a look.

And I saw the moon in its entire splendor, the ridges, the mountains, the craters with the shadows just like I was watching some mountain range on earth at a near distance with binoculars. It was a sight I will never forget in life. I had never dreamt that it would be so beautiful.

Mr. Medhora kindly gave me the address of one “Sharp Vision Schientific Company” a Delhi based company which made telescopes. He also advised me to join the “Amateur Astronomer’s Association” at St. Xavier’s college VT.

The AAA membership was as good as free and I was soon a member. I was part of the premier Amateur Astronomer’s club in Mumbai, perhaps even India. Perks included free membership to the Nehru Planetarium library.

The hard part now was to get a telescope for myself. I had already ordered the catalog from the Sharp Vision Scientific Company as mentioned by Mr. Medhora. The least priced reflector he had in his shop was a 90mm deluxe model with a range of eyepieces to give me 20X to 120X magnification. Enough to kick start me on my voyage of the heavens. The cost was around a thousand odd rupees including postage and handling. Dad did not think it necessary to buy. He was under the impression that it was one of the passing fancies I had developed as a teenager and would soon pass.

I was heartbroken to no extent. It was the end of the world for me. I could see I was not going to get my telescope. Dad was too busy with his own life to notice and pay attention to his son’s. Suddenly one fine day something landed in my hands when searching for something else. It was the passbook of my junior bank account with Apna Bazaar Bank. It was a light blue colored booklet with comic honey bees on it smiling away over a honey comb. Mom had opened this for me years back when I was in my single digit ages to cultivate the good habit of saving.

I flipped through the pages to see entries of sums like 10 to 50 rupees which I had saved in school and deposited month after month from the meager pocket money I used to get per day. In some years the money had accumulated to something like 600 odd rupees. I was determined to buy that telescope and so went ahead to close it and take the money out.

Having done that, I approached dad once again to get a loan of the remaining money for the telescope which he could surely afford. Dad congratulated me on the well managed finance and gave me a speech on how important it is to cultivate such good money management skills for my future life. After the speech he agreed to fund the rest of the money. However in trying to teach me the number game of finance, he lost the number game of a son-dad relation. What he meant had no relevance to me after that point in time. The relation changed forever.

My telescope arrived some time later smelling of fresh plastic construction, paint and adhesive. The outside a dull off white color freshly painted with a cross-hair side refractor to take aim.

I used the telescope for several years staying up late nights in several hundreds of voyages to the great depths of the universe to the moon, the planets, the stars, the fantastic objects which I looked at in the pages of the science journals as a child. Days used to be regular visits to the British Council Library to pick up books on Astronomy by world famed astronomers, referring to the Norton Sky Atlas, browsing the latest issues of magazines like Astronomy Now and others. The telescope and the cheap PVC construction gave me its share of problems. However they were easily ignored with the fine performance of the wonderful optics. How I still wish that Mr. Mathur had not glued the eyepiece together and I could open the lenses and clean the fungi which gradually developed inside after some years.

Somewhere years later when I got busy after college, the journeys stopped as I became more engaged with matters of not so distant objects on planet earth.

My fascination of the stars has not yet died. Too many times when I am out at night on a rare occasion, I casually look up at the sky to see the same constellations and stars with the same affection as some one would have seen a thousand, two thousand or ten thousand years ago.

Today out of curiosity and to see how the company who I bought my first telescope, I loaded up google and typed in “Sharp Vision Scientific Company” in the search space. Lo and behold, I was thrown up a site by the same name. Excitedly I visited the site only to find that the site content was a word to word copy of the colorful catalog I had got more than 10-15 years back. Everything about the company is the same. The deluxe model today is matt black in color and costs around 3200 rupees. However things are different today. I can buy the highest costing telescope today without batting an eye-lid.

I have already taken Eesha who is just 3 years old to Nehru Planetarium with the hope that she will one day be bitten by the science bug, the same way that I was as a child. I do wish Mr. V.C. Mathur and his Sharp Vision Scientific company good health and hope to one day buy a telescope for my daughter and watch her eyes grow big in awe in the various voyages of the universe.

I will also remember to buy her the set of “Tell Me Why” books for her to read. I will also remember to spend time whenever she comes up to me fascinated with something she wants. Trying to see her needs from her eyes and mind. To understand that in her tiny world those things would perhaps mean the world to her. I would rather not judge those needs from my eyes today.

http://www.sharpvisonindia.com/index.htm