Following NASA

It’s not the fever or the running nose or the itching or the Body pain, but it’s the seclusion that hurts you the most when you are down with chicken pox. The varicella zoster virus, struck me down. Stranded up in a room, quarantined from your dear and near, you wonder what you are going to do during the next two weeks of imminent boredom that awaits you.

As the feeling of being an untouchable or outcaste started seeping into my bones, I looked for options to engage myself. In today’s world, where your existence on earth is acknowledged only if you have a Facebook, Orkut or Twitter account, the thought that I am an untouchable only to the physical world but not to the cyber world, brought some relief. It was then that I remembered about my quiescent Twitter account.

Twitter, which was popularized by the likes of Shashi Tharoor, Lalit Modi & Sunanda Pushkar, doesn’t need any introduction in India. But for all those who are not much updated on Twitter - technically speaking, it’s a microblogging site, where you can publish your views on anything in just under 140 characters and figuratively speaking, it’s the biggest social revolution that has happened ever since Internet was conceived.

It was during the initial days of Tharoor controversies that I got attracted towards Twitter. I created an account and started following Tharoor. I was amazed by his knowledge, jealous about his travels and happy about the controversies that he created every other day. First the Holycow, then the Interlocutor, Sweat Equity, Sunanda Pushkar, Lalit Modi, the controversies were boiling one after the other and made my Twitter sojourn interesting.

However, the interest didn’t last for long. After the IPL scam was sorted out and Lalit modi and Shashi Tharoor was shown the door, there were not many controversial high profile guys who could make my Twitter days interesting and I slowly became inactive in Twitter. But thanks to chickenpox now, I reinvented Twitter.

On my comeback I found out that it was not just Holy Cows and Cattle class, but from Barack Obama to Sumit Kumar (he is a member of Team Voyage), everybody was in Twitter. I found many interesting profiles, Rajeev Masand – India’s most popular film critic, Lalettan – Malyalees favourite actor Mohanlal, Harsha Bhogle – Cricket Commentator, Vir Sanghvi – one of the leading Indian journalists, the list went on. I started following many of them and started receiving updates on my mobile about what they are upto at this moment, their views on important issues, etc. So one day, got a tweet from Lalettan saying that he was having shooting at Ooty for his forthcoming movie “Kandahar”, the next day he was flying to United States. I wished him a Happy Journey…Yes!!! I wished my favourite actor a Happy Journey which I never thought was possible in my Life. This is what you call a social revolution. You can put your point to any damn guy in this world, let alone Lalettan, you can even scold Obama for his Afghan misadventures.

As I ventured more into Twitter, I realised that there are more valuable profiles like NASA, ESA etc. I joined them as well, and to my astonishment found that they update every minute detail of the activities carried out by their centers. I was stunned by the social responsibility they exhibit by sharing every piece of information in the public domain.

Now I get to know more details of NASA and its activities through their updates in Twitter. Last month they faced an issue with the Cooling system in the space station. Every single detail of the issue, including the problems they faced while rectifying it was updated in real time.

The experience with ESA was also not much different. They were updating a minute by minute detail of the recent Ariane Launch which put two Arabsat satellites in orbit. They even reported a last minute hold at T-7 minutes. Thanks to Twitter, BSNL 3G and Smart Phone, I could enjoy the 198th launch of Ariane lying down in my sick bed. The transparency they follow in their launch program justifies the credibility they enjoy in the international commercial launch sector.

I searched for similar profiles of ISRO and ended up in finding a dormant profile of Bhuvan. It would be nice if ISRO also have a Twitter account; it would help lot of our people in getting more details about the activities of ISRO and thereby generating more interest in space technologies. As the new age saying goes, “If you are not in Facebook/Twitter, you don’t exist”. Even JAXA has a twitter profile, but they put updates only in Japanese. It seems they are interested to share the information with only their countrymen.

As I was winding up writing this article, there came a tweet from ESA saying “Arianespace to launch GSAT 10 for India”. Hope the day is not so far when we get a tweet from ISRO saying “gsLVM3 to launch Arabsat for ….”