There were some concepts that i found very difficult to grasp as a child.

For example, that the sun is a star.
The sun is yellow, the stars are white. The sun is huge, and the stars are so tiny. How can the sun be a star, I never quite understood.

That man is an animal.
I just didn't get it. It wasn't a matter of my refusing to accept that i had inferior intellectual capabilities- I was quite resigned to that by the time. I just couldn't get how man (who is, well, human) could be an animal.

That man evolved from apes.
wha..? how? I didn't even understand this enough to ask questions. But since everyone said it was right, i just accepted it and moved on.

Today, i realise how little i question the things around me. because i am so used to not understanding things, but knowing that they are (somehow) the way they are, that i just accept them. and that's that. In cochin, gayle kept asking questions that i didn't know the answers to, and it really bothered me that i could take so many things for granted. like- how does hair grow? Yesterday, my dad and i were talking about fluid dynamics, and he told me how there are some things about fluid dynamics that nobody can figure, despite knowing so much about water and its properties.


It irks me that we know so little about the world we live in. and yet we have this conception that we own the world. there are so many things about this world that i don't understand, and possibly never will, no matter how hard i try.

One night in Cochin, just as i was going to bed (it was already some 15 minutes past lights out and everyone except the mentors were asleep), Debbie came into the outhouse and demanded that i come out and see something. I was a little peeved, because I was sleepy and it was late, and Debbie had this annoying grin on her face. But i went out anyway. She took me to the middle of the courtyard, and told me to look up.

When i looked up, i saw the stars like i have never seen them before. They looked like they were right above our house, and were there just for us. They seemed so close that If i just jumped up a little, i could grab them. But when i thought about what they really were- great masses of burning fire millions of light years away- i was awestruck.

Because, what are we, in comparison to these great big stars? Just tiny human beings, is what! We think we've got so much power, and so much intelligence, but if these balls of fire decided to come crashing down on us right now, we'd never be able to do anything. In the bigger scheme of things, my life its whole entire bubble seemed so small. I hold so little clout in this universe, and i could never change the way the world works.

So what was i doing? Spending 200 smackers, going to another country, trying to make the world a better place? Who the bloody hell did i think i was? Some sort of higher human being, compared to others? Did I think I was better? Who was i to say what better was? I felt like a small, arrogant, pompous fool that night, under those stars. Those very stars taught me humility, a lesson my parents have been trying to teach me for 16 years.

And while staring at that sky, I saw my first shooting star. I made a wish upon that star, and went back to bed, feeling, for the first time- small but happy.