Amidst the stars
I am in Allahabad these days… my home town...
Having lived in mega cities of Bombay, Delhi and Cairo… life in Allahabad appears to be boring… more so when… I don’t have a internet connection… when I am stranded in a city that barely has 6-8 hours of electricity supply… when there is no friend or foe remaining… and when my wife and son are in Delhi…
So yesterday I decided to go to the Anand Bhawan (the building of happiness)…
Anand Bhawan was the ancestral house of India’s first family… the Nehru-Gandhi family. India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was born in Allahabad… in the Anand Bhawan… then Indira Gandhi too was born is this same place.
Today, the place has been converted into a museum and houses a number of memories of the era bygone. A part of the building, called Swaraj Bhawan (the building of independence)… has been converted into a children activity centre. Every summers, couple of hundred kids from all over Allahabad join the center and learn… painting, photography, pottery, carpentry and what not… I remember, that when I was a kid… I used to go to Swaraj Bhawan and spend time reading comics and magazine… (I was first introduced to “Misha” the children magazine published by Mir Publishers of erstwhile Soviet Union… over there)… I also tried my hands at painting… and pottery… (In fact, there was a time when I could make clay pots, cups and saucers… may be one day I would relearn it all)
The museum… is a small one and yet engrossing. Every time, I go there I return with some thought to ponder over. This time while walking through the library of Nehru… I saw a book written by Veer Savarkar… on the “First War of Indian Independence”… it was an eye opener… a person like Nehru… a fiercely secular person… whose credentials cannot be challenged by any arm-chair secularist of the era we live in… chose to read Savarkar… whose basic philosophy was about creating a Hindu state. Now what does that mean… it means that Nehru was not rabidly opposed to any idea… and studied every idea, researched every idea… before forming his world view…. Much unlike… a number of pseudo intellectuals (Mostly leftist) of India… who detest the very mention of any rightist literature. The greatness of Nehru and his liberal pursuit of knowledge should be a lesson for them all.
Then there was a photographic exhibition going on… it had a photo of Nehru with Shankar… the great cartoonist… I am told both were good friends. Shankar was also a collector of dolls… he collected more than 2000 dolls from various countries in the world… and finally created a museum of dolls- called Shankar Doll Museum… located in Delhi, it is one of its kind.
A little ahead was a book shop… I remember last time when I visited (and that was about 15 years ago)… the shop used to sell books from National Book Trust… (NBT publishes a number of informative children books)… this time, however, most of the books were very very superficial… I asked the book-owner… what happened to those cheap and informative NBT books… he smiled… there are no takers…highly metaphoric… today there are no takers for the liberal humanist traditions of Nehru and Gandhi too.
Nevertheless, I bought “My experiments with truth” for nth time in my life… I have never had enough of this book… the message of this book is profound… it must be one of the two most profound books I have ever read… the other being “An autobiography of a Yogi”.
A couple of steps away from this place is the Jawahar Planetarium…. It was one of the first Planetariums to be built in India… first was in Kolkata and this was the second… built with the help of Soviet Union… it had delighted generations and generations of Allahabadites.
During my childhood, I used to regularly go there… I couldn’t understand much of it… but I was dazed by the sight of stars all around… and the air-conditioned environment inside. Going there was a picnic… of sorts.
I made up my mind to see a show over there… the show turned out to be a pleasant surprise… there were a number of kids from a local school that turned up to see the show. It was fascinating to see their enthusiasm to know about the cosmos around.
The Planetarium has two machines… one which gives a person’s weight on moon and one that gives a person’s weight in Jupiter… I remember… it used to be a source of mirth for us…imagine weighing just 7 kgs or weighing 700 kgs… that is the kind of weights that weighing machine used to give us.
I bought a solar clock for 10 rupees… today it was cloudy… I will try to use it tomorrow and smile… for I would unravel my childhood yet again with it.
The show was on stars… and how they are born…. Before that the show gave us primer on the movement of the stars… I could understand how zodiac signs are decided…
Then the discussion shifted to nebulae, to stars, to white dwarfs and to black holes… in half an hour show… I saw it all…
It’s strange but true… having read books like… Big Bang, A Brief History of Almost Everything, A brief history of Time, Cosmos… I still could learn something new from that rudimentary children star show…
I learnt one more thing… never close your eyes when some knowledge is being disbursed… howsoever elementary….
Having lived in mega cities of Bombay, Delhi and Cairo… life in Allahabad appears to be boring… more so when… I don’t have a internet connection… when I am stranded in a city that barely has 6-8 hours of electricity supply… when there is no friend or foe remaining… and when my wife and son are in Delhi…
So yesterday I decided to go to the Anand Bhawan (the building of happiness)…
Anand Bhawan was the ancestral house of India’s first family… the Nehru-Gandhi family. India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was born in Allahabad… in the Anand Bhawan… then Indira Gandhi too was born is this same place.
Today, the place has been converted into a museum and houses a number of memories of the era bygone. A part of the building, called Swaraj Bhawan (the building of independence)… has been converted into a children activity centre. Every summers, couple of hundred kids from all over Allahabad join the center and learn… painting, photography, pottery, carpentry and what not… I remember, that when I was a kid… I used to go to Swaraj Bhawan and spend time reading comics and magazine… (I was first introduced to “Misha” the children magazine published by Mir Publishers of erstwhile Soviet Union… over there)… I also tried my hands at painting… and pottery… (In fact, there was a time when I could make clay pots, cups and saucers… may be one day I would relearn it all)
The museum… is a small one and yet engrossing. Every time, I go there I return with some thought to ponder over. This time while walking through the library of Nehru… I saw a book written by Veer Savarkar… on the “First War of Indian Independence”… it was an eye opener… a person like Nehru… a fiercely secular person… whose credentials cannot be challenged by any arm-chair secularist of the era we live in… chose to read Savarkar… whose basic philosophy was about creating a Hindu state. Now what does that mean… it means that Nehru was not rabidly opposed to any idea… and studied every idea, researched every idea… before forming his world view…. Much unlike… a number of pseudo intellectuals (Mostly leftist) of India… who detest the very mention of any rightist literature. The greatness of Nehru and his liberal pursuit of knowledge should be a lesson for them all.
Then there was a photographic exhibition going on… it had a photo of Nehru with Shankar… the great cartoonist… I am told both were good friends. Shankar was also a collector of dolls… he collected more than 2000 dolls from various countries in the world… and finally created a museum of dolls- called Shankar Doll Museum… located in Delhi, it is one of its kind.
A little ahead was a book shop… I remember last time when I visited (and that was about 15 years ago)… the shop used to sell books from National Book Trust… (NBT publishes a number of informative children books)… this time, however, most of the books were very very superficial… I asked the book-owner… what happened to those cheap and informative NBT books… he smiled… there are no takers…highly metaphoric… today there are no takers for the liberal humanist traditions of Nehru and Gandhi too.
Nevertheless, I bought “My experiments with truth” for nth time in my life… I have never had enough of this book… the message of this book is profound… it must be one of the two most profound books I have ever read… the other being “An autobiography of a Yogi”.
A couple of steps away from this place is the Jawahar Planetarium…. It was one of the first Planetariums to be built in India… first was in Kolkata and this was the second… built with the help of Soviet Union… it had delighted generations and generations of Allahabadites.
During my childhood, I used to regularly go there… I couldn’t understand much of it… but I was dazed by the sight of stars all around… and the air-conditioned environment inside. Going there was a picnic… of sorts.
I made up my mind to see a show over there… the show turned out to be a pleasant surprise… there were a number of kids from a local school that turned up to see the show. It was fascinating to see their enthusiasm to know about the cosmos around.
The Planetarium has two machines… one which gives a person’s weight on moon and one that gives a person’s weight in Jupiter… I remember… it used to be a source of mirth for us…imagine weighing just 7 kgs or weighing 700 kgs… that is the kind of weights that weighing machine used to give us.
I bought a solar clock for 10 rupees… today it was cloudy… I will try to use it tomorrow and smile… for I would unravel my childhood yet again with it.
The show was on stars… and how they are born…. Before that the show gave us primer on the movement of the stars… I could understand how zodiac signs are decided…
Then the discussion shifted to nebulae, to stars, to white dwarfs and to black holes… in half an hour show… I saw it all…
It’s strange but true… having read books like… Big Bang, A Brief History of Almost Everything, A brief history of Time, Cosmos… I still could learn something new from that rudimentary children star show…
I learnt one more thing… never close your eyes when some knowledge is being disbursed… howsoever elementary….
1 comment:
Now this motivates me to visit Netaji's birthplace in Cuttack next time I go home..
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