Vikram

On one fine Saturday morning in early 1960s, Rev. Dr. Peter Bernard Pereira – the then Bishop of Trivandrum – had a strange guest who had come to his house with a stranger request. The Reverend listened to him patiently but did not respond immediately. Instead, he invited the man to join the Mass the next day. At the end of the Sunday Mass, the Bishop spoke to the assembled crowd, “My children, I have a famous scientist with me who wants our church and the place I live for the work of space science and research. Science seeks truth that enriches human life. The higher level of religion is spirituality. The spiritual preachers seek the help of the Almighty to bring peace to human minds. In short, what Vikram is doing and what I am doing are the same - both science and spirituality seek the Almighty's blessings for human prosperity in mind and body. Children, can we give them God's abode for a scientific mission?” As narrated by Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam in his book ‘Ignited Minds: Unleashing The Power Within India’, the Bishop’s question was greeted by an unsettling silence, and as Dr. Vikram Sarabhai waited eagerly, the church finally reverberated with a loud and hearty ‘Amen’ from all present! A grateful Dr. Sarabhai and team promptly swung into action. The entire village of fisherfolks was relocated nearby, and a new Church was built for the faithful in 100 days flat. The erstwhile St Mary Magdalene Church and Rev. Pereira’s living quarters – located strategically on the magnetic equator and blessed with a narrow ribbon of very strong electrojet current (therefore making it ideal for studying the ionosphere) – thus became the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station where the first seeds of Indian space research were sown amidst infrastructural constraints unthinkable by rocket scientists anywhere else in the world. As the eponymous lander 'Vikram' touched down near the lunar south pole today with its aptly named rover 'Pragyan' (wisdom), here’s remembering that distant weekend when two #leaders, at two seemingly opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, converged on the same grand vision of the future so that one day the sky could no longer be the limit for India