Science, Man on the Moon and the TV

Abhinaya Thapa

When were little, apart from Nepali and Hindi everything was ‘English’. We used to think every ‘foreigner or Khare’ was English or American, so everybody who is embodied in this form and color speaks that language. Indeed everything was English, though American in some sense rather than being British, the cars, TVS, airplanes, rockets and even science. This latter part ‘science’ was huge term with mathematics, which used to include in it all above mentioned things and ‘without a god’. At that time, our mother’s language used to incorporate god in almost every relation and meanings. It was reason, cause and end, like in metaphysics, but in the texts of the mathematics and science, there was a vacuum. ‘The sun rises in the east’, ‘1+1=2’ and every subtraction and earth and planet revolution is on the cause of nothing. If any cause or reason was possibly assumable, it was on the value of self, in the outcome of the exam and for ‘to be great person in the future’.

The first attack on the omnipresent, all- everything god occurred after we had heard about the man on the moon. One of our aunties used to worship full moon every month and give us ‘Prasads’. Then she would narrate tales on different gods and demons, but one day my brother told her in the midst of her act, ‘man had already pissed on the moon, why do you worship it even after that?’ I don’t recollect her reaction, but we were confronted with new things- rockets and Neil Armstrong, a fantasy and idol. The limit of sky was suddenly changed like into traveling places and stations, there was beyond after it, maybe planets and gods of heavens and of tales. But after the incursion of the TV the stories of the ‘Sosatni’ remains just tales. The image was to turn everything upside and down, because god was to descend in the image of humans like us.

At late eighties a Hindi serial ‘Ramayana’ and its fights of blazing, dazzling bows was talk of ‘everyone’ (in class and spatial, urban sense). Here god for the first time was personified but he was on the TV. It was on the same plane with ‘Ram god’, maybe almost higher because suddenly the urban homes were segregated on the existence of it. The ‘Ram thing’ just like sayings was in the soul and home of everybody but not the screen, with face of an Indian. It became a thing of rich and poor, a demarcation line of status and class but again ‘an English thing’. Those with the TVs changed their relation and annexed themselves with world ‘English and Europe’ with talks of new gods like ‘Maradona, Jackson and Rambos’. Others were left with chances of glimpses from ‘others’ TVs and with their old gods without a face and glamour’s of the screen. Here god became a ‘rich thing’ adorned in the attires the king, but revealing through the marvels of the science, without which the revelation was impossible.

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