There are so many things that make our childhood days memorable – it could be something that you shared with your friends, a game that you played the most during summers, a hike, a silly insignificant incident that makes no sense to most except a few or it could just be you troubling the night watchman by making him believe he saw a ghost; for me and a few of my friends, besides all this, it was mostly all about the stars!
The Universe always had intrigued us friends. Every late evening, we would rush to the terrace with a telescope which a kind physicist living nearby was more than happy to lend. We would look through the skies identifying constellations, naming stars for future lookup. Most of us hadn’t yet been exposed to the internet, and books were still objects that a young mind could easily recognize and appreciate. So, we would spend hours studying star maps taken from various books and magazines and try to map the stars at various times during the year. The urge to understand more about the Universe was so gripping that we made it a point to view every astronomical event that would take place. We truly thought that the stars were ours for the taking.
Over the next year or so, things changed. We were slowly growing up and were also growing out of celestial objects and their myths. Our stargazing meets started fading away into the horizon. A few of us took to music, a few took to dance, a few took art and almost all of us gave up on the stars. I guess for most of us it was a time when we were looking for our calling, and clearly, the heavens weren’t anywhere in our sight. Stargazing was, after all, just another “activity”.
But something very important had happened during those times we all had spent together. We had learnt at a young age what it was like to look for something in the dark for hours and not finding anything. We could be patient when there was moonlight blocking the skies and the stars weren’t visible. We didn’t know what existed out there, but always believed we’d find something new and interesting. We knew it pained a lot to focus and get a target in sight on the telescope. We had known it was not easy finding stars in the sky and to keep looking for them throughout the night was an altogether different task - a task which was difficult but definitely not impossible.
I guess stargazing taught us more about staying grounded than anything else. I guess it made us gaze across our little universe with a different outlook and see things in a tad bit different a light. I can only hope and wish that we keep being reminded of how it is not always easy to achieve things. That may probably make us appreciate and understand the endeavors of others too.
And though out of practice since some time now, I’m sure we can still recognize many of the stars we spent hours looking for – and, oh yeah, where to find that ridiculously and treacherously hidden Andromeda Galaxy! ;)
