So Mars has a new house guest. For an intelligent junk joining other intelligent junk that took less money to get there than did a recent set-in-space Hollywood movie, it sure has settled down comfortably into orbit, why, even already uploading snaps and updating statuses on social networking sites.
Do we hope to see little green men playing poker on the red-carpeted new home (home to bad puns, too!)?
Among other things, that’s definitely on the plan, so says ISRO. So that’s all over the internet now; everyone quipping about Mangalyaan. So was I, scrolling down one news page a couple of days back, and there was this picture of the ISRO engineering team, deserved happiness orbiting (bad puns on earth, too!) their faces. As I look at several other pages, there always is at least one image of the people back on Earth. But there was something else which got my attention slightly more: the women! As it happens, Indian women are no longer the timid, veiled, shadowy sidekicks; they are the superheroes themselves! The engineering team boasts a great number of women, who helped launch the bundle of joy and metal into space.
In times when the front page news is about the woman being the victim, this space probe’s success certainly kicks that into the stratosphere. Women are indeed great engineers, having helped India become one of the very, very few elite countries to have a probe successfully enter the Martian orbit – and, at an astronomically cheap price (it costs lesser than the space-bound Hollywood movie, as I mentioned before). There may be blood on the streets, in domestic disputes that scar women into the dark depths of Club Suppressed, but there’s enough whining to go around, the ISRO women aren’t waiting around for a man to feed them or push them around – they’ve taken on a ‘man’s’ job, and are doing a pretty good work.
To see women excel in science and technology is incredibly inspirational. What adds more to the hope is the fact that they are not shying away from men-dominated fields like science and technology. They are increasingly proving that there is in fact no such thing as a ‘men-dominated field’, that their capabilities are in no dearth of comparison to the other sex. In fact, there really remains no need to even write articles expressing women’s power being equal or stronger to that of men’s, because there simply lies no ground for comparison anymore. Probably the only reason we do compare is because a large part of this country still manufactures ideas on belittling them. They should know that women are not going to bow down to any kind of force, no matter how cosmic, incidentally having worked out a few cosmic forces of their own, as it turns out!
Science and technology is indeed a tough field, but by no means a ‘man’s field’. So while Mangalyaan clicks selfies and enjoys the view and tweets updates for us mortals back home, here’s to Earth toasting to the great efforts of the ISRO team, men and women included!
