What's Keeping India From Interstellar Reservation?

Indian National Congress’s Udit Raj thinks tangentially and asks the right questions.

Bangabandhu Satellite-1 Mission. The Axiom-4 mission flew on the same Falcon 9 Block 5 launch vehicle. Official SpaceX Photos via Wikimedia Commons

It was a celebratory moment. What began with Axiom-4’s launch was coming full circle. The skies were (metaphorically) clear for the second Indian in space, the first in the International Space Station, to make a re-entry into the earthly Matrubhumi.

We, as humans with blood-soaked beating hearts, no matter the colour or prescribed category of the outer shell, could have left it at that, you know? But Udit Raj wasn’t having it. The very outspoken and often front-page-worthy controversy kickstarter and Congress flagbearer decided to stir a vortex of ill winds that very day. We Indians couldn’t be more indecisively prouder!

In his insightful remarks while congratulating Shubhanshu Shukla on his return, Raj supplies us with an unquestionable rhetoric that makes the common man think hard. Too hard, perhaps. Never thought I’d see a vein pop up for critical thinking.

Translation, as quoted by India Today, is as follows:

“I do wonder, though, when Rakesh Sharma was sent for the first time, there weren’t many educated people from SC/ST/OBC communities. But this time, someone could have been sent from these communities. This time, I think it was the turn to send a Dalit.”

He continues this with a logically infallible statement:

“It is not that NASA conducted an exam, and then there was a selection. Any Dalit or OBC could have been sent in place of Shukla ji.”

I don’t see any issue with that. Look, you need to apply critical thinking on just the right levels to enable enough blood flow to your brain. Maybe then, you’ll be able to open it to a new dimension of possibilities like Udit Raj—a sixth dimension that even Nolan’s Cooper, played by the very versatile McConaughey, could never visit.

No Colour Out In Space

Pins from our puny perspective. Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

Space is humongous and, quite frankly, empty. Yes there are many objects, but they’re so far apart that your immediate vicinity is always going to be and endless pit of void. All the stars and galaxies we see are ghostly projections of interstellar objects reaching our meek retinas through what I like to call “old light.”

All those Pinterest-able images coming in from Hubble, JWST, and land-based telescopes are painted with very clever science to make the objects (or rather their elements) more distinguishable.

Up there, there is no colour. Well, you might argue, there is still the blackness of space and the white of the life-giving stars. True, but that dichotomy of good and evil doesn’t work here, does it? Stars will burn you if you fly too close. In my books, space is colourless. Or grey. Grey is sufficiently colourless and, as David Mitchell intoned in that one episode of Would I Lie to You, unnoteworthy.

But there is something that you might not be able to comprehend, dear reader. Space is already littered with classifications and segregations. There’s the usual roster of stars, planets, satellites, asteroids, and comets, all governed under our galaxy. Look closer with your backyard telescope, however, and you’ll see it’s not a “grass is more hydrogen on the other side” picturesque postcard as it appears to be.

Stars themselves come under various classifications. Those like the Sun have their youth phase, then they explode into a red giant, followed by the old age of a white dwarf—once mighty now crumpled under their own weight. The beefier stars? They end up extremely dense (neutron star), only to either explode into brilliance (supernova) or implode to bend the space-time around them (black hole; insert “yo mama” joke here).

Planets might seem like safe category. But those rocky objects that couldn’t become planets? They’ve been pushed to the fringes. Asteroids man the border between rocky spheres and literal giants named after Roman Gods and someone’s anus. Comets are only allowed entry from the Kuiper belt once every couple hundred years or so, and even then, they’re subjected to intense heat. Those small chunks flinging about got trapped under planetary gravity fields, forced to slave around their host planets as moons and rings.

And let’s not forget the peasants in this equation: planetoids and exoplanets ostracized because they don’t belong to the hegemony of the pristine eight. It hasn’t been long since Pluto was demoted for not following planetary rules, and that was way before its icy pockmarked anatomy had been sufficiently mapped.

The Science of Representational Matter

Why did I give a brief on basic astronomy, you ask? You need it to launch your ideas on the lines of Udit Raj’s clever trajectory.

Under the echoes of calls on Pluto’s barring from the planetary category, Raj deftly jabs at the reigning government as to why they keep the backward and underrepresented communities of India in the far orbit. After all, as he so eloquently—and with much aplomb—points out, NASA doesn’t conduct an exam.

There is no meritocracy whatsoever under which Shubhanshu Shukla was chosen. Months of pilot training and G-force tolerances could just as well have been done by anyone else. Do you see any far-flung comets coming close to the Sun being forced into planetary orbital traps? No, of course not. They forge their own path.

In a 6-D chess move, Raj uplifts the backward classes of India. He does so not by advocating for efficient, high-quality education channels, proposing improved food and job security, or by supplying equal opportunity in the strata of the present society.

No, he is a visionary looking into the cosmic future and claiming, with utmost certainty, a representational stake in interstellar reservation for so distant a future.

The game right now doesn’t matter.

Raj is reaching for the highest glass ceiling, quite literally, and breaking it for the betterment of society. It’s only some moves later that you see his politics claiming a checkmate for when the cosmic governments shunt backward classes to asteroid duty, or worse, upkeep of planetary rings. Tch!