Friday, May 20, 2011

Confessing another long-running love affair!

As the NASA space shuttle program comes to an end, I realize that it is the end of an affair for me; yet another affair that goes back to my teenage years in a far, far away Neyveli.

One of the high school subjects that fascinated me the most was physics.  To such an extent that once when I had a nagging question about what happens to the speed of light as it gets refracted when it travels through different media, and when my high school teacher couldn't provide me with a satisfying answer, I decided to write to a physics professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Madras.

It was those prehistoric days before the internet.  All I knew was that there was a professor named "Ram Shastri" that another physics teacher, who had moved on to a different town, had mentioned at some point.  So, I addressed that letter to Professor Ram Shastri at IIT-Madras, and detailed my question to him.

It would be a terrible understatement to say that I was ecstatic when I got a reply from a Professor Shastri, whom I had never met.  I was blown away that a professor at that level would care to respond to a student like me.  I wish I had saved that letter!

So, yes, physics fascinated me. Physics was also the opening to understanding the cosmos.  It was such a profound love for the subject that solidified my friendship with a classmate, Srikumar.  He was as much a physics nut as I was.  Though, I suppose, to him physics and philosophy went together a lot more than the physics and math combination that worked for me.

It was through Srikumar that I came to understand NASA's space shuttle program.  The miniscule resources at out local library had next to nothing on this, which meant that we had to rely on newspaper and radio reports.  I think Srikumar wrote to NASA, or perhaps it was to the US embassy in India, asking for informational materials about the space shuttle, and I recall him getting quite a bit of glossy printed materials.

One can imagine, therefore, the thrill I had following the news about the successful launch of Space Shuttle Columbia, which was about the time we were having our school leaving final exams.  It was also because of such an intense personal connection that I was devastated when Columbia did not make a successful reentry back in 2003. 

Such a teenage love doesn't die, of course, and these are the kind of affairs I hope to carry to my very end, which, for all I know, is simply round the corner :)

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