ISRO successfully launched Chandrayan 3's third lunar exploration mission on 14th July 2023. It is expected to make a soft landing on the southern lunar pole after a month-long journey on 23rd August. When the GSLV Mark 3 (LVM 3) heavy-lift launch vehicle lifted off successfully from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh’s Sriharikota as per the scheduled launch time at 2.35 PM, the roar of the engines symbolically matched just not the joy of the people behind it, but the euphoria of the whole nation who celebrated the achievement. India stands to become the 99th country that has such technological capabilities. The picture of ISRO scientists carrying a rocket on a bicycle to this launch of the 14th describes the story of India which in just 75 years emerged from its struggle with poverty, malnutrition, disease, and early mortality to assert its position as a global political, economic and knowledge power to reckon with.
Basic knowledge empowers us and can make us arrogant but higher knowledge and wisdom make us aware of the limitation of our knowledge and our powerlessness.
When a neuro or a cardiothoracic surgeon bows before his God, before attempting a complex surgery to save his patient, his act demonstrates that he is nervous and aware of his limitations and the large number of exogenous factors which can affect his best-laid plans and efforts negatively. He is aware of the hopes of the patient and his relatives who think that he only can pull off a miracle after God himself. He is in the same situation as a gladiator who is expected to slay the lion by hundreds of onlookers in the gallery. He just prays for those uncertainties, and unknown and hostile forces not to act here. The doctor and the scientists are not allowed to philosophize about failures.
It's difficult for a rationalist with primary school-level knowledge of science to understand that the doctors and scientists at ISRO are not superstitious - they are humble, sincere, and wise; they want their efforts to succeed.
When Oppenheimer quoted Bhagawat Geeta after the first nuclear test, he didn't speak as a Hindu fanatic but as a wise man who knew how that act stands to destroy and change the world forever.
Time to grow out of the ego state empowered by the mechanistic and reductionist interpretation of the science we know so far and bow before those limitless powers of which we are not even aware. The scientists of the Western world who propounded and popularised those models are realizing their own folly after bringing the world to the throes of destruction in the name of industrialization and economic development.
Many treat those unknown powerful forces as Gods
and not everyone who bows before those forces are religious and superstitious.
Just wow!
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