Hey, sorry, I'm not going to answer the question in the title. I don't even know if something like that exists. A prologue that doesn't precede the story! Defies its very purpose isn't it. However, I heard some wise man/woman say, "Better late than never" , so I'm going to write the prologue now. Better now than never right ?
An ordinary day, my friends and I meet up in our usual hangout spot to discuss the nitty gritty details around which each of our lives revolve. No no, not gossip. Definitely not. I would call it exchange of 'useful' information and 'life lessons' !!
One such day, my dear friend says "I read a page from the kids encyclopaedia to my elder one everyday. Some simply amazing stuff you know". I said ,"Wow. that's something nice. Tell me about it." She said about Earth's gravity, it's pull on the moon and many other things and how her 6 year old was able to understand and make correlations. She seemed thrilled. I was too. We wanted to make correlations and apply what we'd learnt too. Thus started our discussion. Very basic questions. Why does the moon go around the earth and not stick onto it like how we all manage to stay grounded. Why didn't the Sun pull the moon to it's side and how it lost the moon to the Earth ? Did it actually lose the moon to the Earth ? Does the moon have gravity? Why doesn't it make the Earth go around it ? And so on and so forth. We went back home with many such basic questions. I'm sure we all faced these questions in school either with multiple choice answers or in the essay-questions. I've come beyond schooling now.Way way beyond. I knew all the concepts. But something was missing. Something. Like a missing link maybe ! Point to note here would be , both of us knew that gravity would answer almost all the questions above.We weren't satisfied. Needed to dig deeper. Thus started my quest for these basic but beautiful things that we often take for granted.
Just a day later, I went for a train ride with my 3 year old. His first train ride. He diligently spotted the stones on the train tracks and asked me with wide eyes " Ma, why didn't they clean the tracks? It's full of stones. Or did they put it there for some purpose?" For a minute, I was dumbstruck. Not because I didn't know the answer to his question, what bothered me more was that, why didn't I think of that question? I'm bigger, I understand things better, and hence that question should've come to me first. Then I realised, maybe that's the problem. I'm bigger! I take things for granted. I've lost the need to question. That precise moment is when I realised that I should definitely encourage my son and make sure he doesn't lose that wonderful habit of questioning things (the why-factor I call it), in the process of "growing-up". I immediately appreciated him for having come up with that wonderful question, I quietly did a google from my phone ( many thanks to the google guys and the fact that technology could save me from a little embarrassment) and explained him the 'ballast' in words he would understand. He gave me a huge smile and that filled up my heart!
The day I went home with both these feelings, is the day I gave the search engines so much work, so much work, looking for all related articles on the internet. I read, I read and I read extensively. I also have this obsessive compulsive disorder where I have to impart my newly learnt knowledge to someone, (sometimes it is the first random friend/acquaintance I see ) as soon as my mind has absorbed it. No wonder I have a very few and handful of them !! The point I'm trying to make here is that , my urge to let people read and understand what I just learnt was so huge that I completely skipped this small piece of post and went straight on to the explain the Moon's behaviour first, wherein I should've explained mine !!
Anyways, that's the story today. The articles that precede the prologue(!!?) and the articles that follow are all very simple and basic physics/science questions, which I didn't have time to enjoy when I was schooling. But, which I find absolutely amazing. Gives me the 'aahaa' moments. Read on and say "Aaaahaaaaaaaaaaa " !
An ordinary day, my friends and I meet up in our usual hangout spot to discuss the nitty gritty details around which each of our lives revolve. No no, not gossip. Definitely not. I would call it exchange of 'useful' information and 'life lessons' !!
One such day, my dear friend says "I read a page from the kids encyclopaedia to my elder one everyday. Some simply amazing stuff you know". I said ,"Wow. that's something nice. Tell me about it." She said about Earth's gravity, it's pull on the moon and many other things and how her 6 year old was able to understand and make correlations. She seemed thrilled. I was too. We wanted to make correlations and apply what we'd learnt too. Thus started our discussion. Very basic questions. Why does the moon go around the earth and not stick onto it like how we all manage to stay grounded. Why didn't the Sun pull the moon to it's side and how it lost the moon to the Earth ? Did it actually lose the moon to the Earth ? Does the moon have gravity? Why doesn't it make the Earth go around it ? And so on and so forth. We went back home with many such basic questions. I'm sure we all faced these questions in school either with multiple choice answers or in the essay-questions. I've come beyond schooling now.Way way beyond. I knew all the concepts. But something was missing. Something. Like a missing link maybe ! Point to note here would be , both of us knew that gravity would answer almost all the questions above.We weren't satisfied. Needed to dig deeper. Thus started my quest for these basic but beautiful things that we often take for granted.
Just a day later, I went for a train ride with my 3 year old. His first train ride. He diligently spotted the stones on the train tracks and asked me with wide eyes " Ma, why didn't they clean the tracks? It's full of stones. Or did they put it there for some purpose?" For a minute, I was dumbstruck. Not because I didn't know the answer to his question, what bothered me more was that, why didn't I think of that question? I'm bigger, I understand things better, and hence that question should've come to me first. Then I realised, maybe that's the problem. I'm bigger! I take things for granted. I've lost the need to question. That precise moment is when I realised that I should definitely encourage my son and make sure he doesn't lose that wonderful habit of questioning things (the why-factor I call it), in the process of "growing-up". I immediately appreciated him for having come up with that wonderful question, I quietly did a google from my phone ( many thanks to the google guys and the fact that technology could save me from a little embarrassment) and explained him the 'ballast' in words he would understand. He gave me a huge smile and that filled up my heart!
The day I went home with both these feelings, is the day I gave the search engines so much work, so much work, looking for all related articles on the internet. I read, I read and I read extensively. I also have this obsessive compulsive disorder where I have to impart my newly learnt knowledge to someone, (sometimes it is the first random friend/acquaintance I see ) as soon as my mind has absorbed it. No wonder I have a very few and handful of them !! The point I'm trying to make here is that , my urge to let people read and understand what I just learnt was so huge that I completely skipped this small piece of post and went straight on to the explain the Moon's behaviour first, wherein I should've explained mine !!
Anyways, that's the story today. The articles that precede the prologue(!!?) and the articles that follow are all very simple and basic physics/science questions, which I didn't have time to enjoy when I was schooling. But, which I find absolutely amazing. Gives me the 'aahaa' moments. Read on and say "Aaaahaaaaaaaaaaa " !
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