One was that being female would not constrain my access to education and it need not limit my ability to excel in math and science. Indeed, a scientific outlook-rational and objective-was considered essential if the tendencies that had held India back-superstition, blind adherence to religious rituals, and male or caste supremacy-were to be overcome.Īlthough I was too young then to unpack all this, as a child growing up in a family that was focused on progress and modernity, I had internalized several ideas. Famines and floods could be made obsolete and diseases could be eradicated. Electricity, a ubiquitous fruit of such pursuits could be used to keep food cold and also to heat water for baths. It was generally understood that for a poor country like India, the path to becoming prosperous like the “advanced West” lay in harnessing these disciplines. The culture in which I was growing up had great respect for science and technology.
On the human side, I marveled at the courage of the astronauts and their families, knowing that there might be unexpected glitches and that the astronauts might not return. Learning about gravity and atmosphere in school, my imagination was afire as I tried to grasp the intricacies of the research, the planning, and the implementation. I was just old enough to understand the complexity of the technology involved just old enough to have a sense of the risks. Five decades have passed but the names remain as familiar to me as the names of childhood friends. I read about the three astronauts and memorized their names. Not surprisingly, over the months leading up to and following the Apollo 11 mission, Span carried detailed coverage about it. It contained large color photographs and stories about events in America.
First man on the moon newspaper free#
consulate mailed free to thousands of families. I found additional information in Span, the glossy magazine that the U.S. Some accounts affectionately Indianized Armstrong’s name, calling him Nilu- bhau Bhujbal! I recall few specifics about the coverage beyond that it was presented in a breathlessly excited tone. I avidly read articles about Apollo 11 in the Times of India and in the Marathi Loksatta. It was a time when people got all their news from newspapers and from newsreels shown before feature films. Even though there was no broadcast television where she lived, fifty years ago, and the internet did not exist, she has clear memories of her excitement and the wide coverage of this breakthrough achievement. When Neil Armstrong became the first human to step on the moon, in 1969, Nandini Patwardhan was a 10-year-old schoolgirl in India.
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