A recent airplane journey from Asia to America enhanced my wish of being an Astronaut. I’ll tell you why I wanted to be an Astronaut, not for the study or glory or for contribution to space sciences, for me it would just have been a medium of going into the outer space and viewing the beauty of Nature up there. Till now it’s all been my imagination and little knowledge that I have. I wish to dance with the celestial bodies, play with them, slide them like bowling balls, listen to the faint echoing and sometimes booming sounds coming from here and there, I want to see the explosions of supernovas, the formation of stars, the burst of colors, the waves of energy expelled and consumed, the movement of celestial bodies in slow motion, the sprinkle of henceforth unseen shades of colors and hues, the slow walk of planets around their axes. I want to hold the moon in my palms and kiss it lightly, the moon, the beloved of all. I want to see new and unexpected vistas and magic of Nature that would sprout every now and then. I want to see the blue-green speck of Earth from up there, which holds testimony to all my worldly emotions, experiences, happiness and sadness and friends and families and my ‘being’. I want to feel the dead silence. I want to shout out loud. I want to experience the giddying effect of gravity, I want to slide smoothly under gravity’s pull, I want to feel the weightlessness, I want to hop like a Kangaroo on the Moon, I want to feel the vacuüm, I want to touch the different textures of planets and stars, I want to thank the sun for bringing animation post our slumbering nights, I want to smell planets and find out if they have different odors, I want to see each planet in its own character, I want to see
The Spiritedness of the Sun
The Morality of Mercury
The Wishful Beauty of Venus
The Elegance of Earth
The Meekness (and chocolate-fullness) of Mars
The Jumbo-ness of Jupiter
The Superiority of Saturn
The Uniqueness of Uranus
The Naughtiness of Neptune
The Plight of Pluto (post its retirement as a planet)
I want to go beyond the planets. I wish to be an Astro-Photographer, taking photos from up close, capturing the celestial bodies in their glory and gloom, and I want them to pose for me in all the cheerfulness they can muster. I want a shooting star to take me on a ride across the universe, I want to enter at one point and exit from yet another hole via a wormhole, I want to ‘live’ the Einstein’s theory of time and space up there, I want to move with the speed of light and then get converted into energy and become a part of the magical realms of the higher dimensions of \ space.
My air journey, a blessing in every respect, was the closest I got to with my dream 🙂
Within a span of some hours, I saw the Sun rise gloriously. I crossed over deserts, Iceland, huge Oceans. I saw tiny ships in the Atlantic Ocean. There were so many of them, propelling here and there tardily. I saw mounds of ice and mountains covered with ice. I saw Colorful ocean bottoms. All the views I had seen on National Geographic and Discovery Channel were just out of my window. It was Breathtaking! 🙂 The maps I had only seen in a geography book were sketched out in front of me in the Big Picture! I even saw 3 Circular Concentric rings of rainbows. I once read that you can see a circular rainbow from an airplane, but I just couldn’t fathom the idea, considering the fact that I rarely got to see the rainbow in the part of the world I was living in. But when I saw it, it was Jaw-Droopingly Beautiful and Mesmerizing!!!!
I am eternally grateful to the Almighty for the blessing of this journey!
By Ratna Khatri
Ramshackld 