New Delhi: “Just face it… face your fears” – invaluable advice from Annapurni Subramaniam, an astronomer and the Director of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, and Science Icon Of The Year at NDTV’s Indian Of The Year awards.
Ms Subramaniam was responding to a question about how students frightened by subjects like Mathematics and Physics might rise above these challenges. Her advice? “Just face and do it… Math and Physics become friendly once you understand it is really a lot of fun,” she said with a smile.
The advice may have been in response to a specific question, but the spirit behind it underlines Ms Subramaniam’s outlook on life and her determination to study and succeed in her chosen field.
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“I grew up looking up at the stars… it inspired me. But, when I got a chance to study them, of course my parents were worried that I would spend time in remote observatories. My mum even told me, ‘Why don’t you study the Sun? It is in the daytime’,” she recalled with a broad grin.
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“The only thing I could do was take them there and show them what I am passionate about and how I could achieve my dream,” she told NDTV.
Ms Subramaniam, still sporting a happy smile, also underlined the questions all astronomers seek to answer. Picking up on a short speech earlier about gold and gold jewellery, she said, “Astronomers look for how gold is made by the universe… astronomers chase these kinds of weird questions.”
She also recalled a moment while speaking at a school in interior Tamil Nadu, where a student came up to her with a question about Pluto, which was reclassified from a planet to a dwarf planet in 2006.
“So no… we don’t know everything about the solar system. There is so much we are still trying to understand. I am only worried that the next generation may not even be able to see the stars, or sometimes even the Sun. It is important for us to preserve nature and the spirit of curiosity.”
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