When Ziggy Stardust came a calling!

“For here am I sitting in a tin can, far above the world
Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do.”

Lyric from Ground Control to Major Tom by David Bowie



When Ziggy Stardust came a calling!

David Bowie, the androgynous rock superstar, a contemporary of Mick Jagger, just as fully-automatic still as his wizened but sexy pal, long dined out on his interest in space, aliens, “peoploids”, “diamond dogs” and spacemen cast adrift. His fans called themselves Space Cadets and dressed in clothes with see-through plastic bits got up as Star Trekky as possible. Bowie himself was all spandex and glitter, sporting that impossible bulge of a cod-piece, the lipstick and lashes, the layered shag - clearly the oh so masterful, if sexually ambiguous, Commander!

It was a hard act to follow, even for the latter day Bowie. But the music press of the time was most laudatory. And even the “perspective” press, later, as in Time and Newsweek, saw Bowie’s alter ego Ziggy Stardust as something that gave voice to the pent up romance and glamour of space exploration. It made of the Kennedy Space Centre and NASA and HG Wells and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World something wondrous and great. Bowie’s space fantasies struck a chord, locked away in every timid breast watching the flickering images of countdowns and the unknown as they worked their way from 10 to liftoff and beyond.

So perhaps it’s understandable that the Indian media should also hanker after extracting a smidgen of second-hand satisfaction from the visit of US astronaut Sunita Williams, via the tenuous hold on her Indian origins. Our journalists are probably animated by an unspoken romanticism about the heavens that has been knocking around in our breasts since Aryabhata. More so, perhaps, because our indigenous space programme has not graduated beyond hurling unmanned weather-sensing satellites and the like into space.

So naturally, when we light upon a live astronaut of Indian origin in the person of the tall and willowy Sunitabehn, the spirit of appropriation gushes forth and spills over in a profusion of electronic bytes and printing ink. We want to know, with that unblinking, staring curiosity, so dear to Indian notions of scrutiny, how Sunitabehn felt while she was coping with the solitary confinement and zero gravity for six and a half months. And we so like her references to Lord Ganesha in space.

But before we can carry on much further down this path, we are thrown into a neat twist in the bland flag waving PR plot scripted by the US State Department and the impressively well groomed Ambassador Mulford. Without prior warning, and amongst all the spacey talk of silences and deep blueness, we find ourselves, man and boy, transported to Pandyaland.

And there, in Pandyaland, Williams meets a Modi and glosses over, with handshake and smile, a not so ancient killing of her kinsman, in 2003, by alleged terrorists retaliating against Pandya’s rumoured involvements in the Gujarat riots. We also learn how Hiren Pandya, a former BJP State Revenue Minister and Sunitabehn’s cousin, was; and how he suddenly wasn't; and how Narendra Modi had denied him a ticket in the 2002 elections, a year before Pandya was tragically assassinated.

Pandya is a dead rival now, killed through no fault of Modi’s. Still, here was a Space-given opportunity to deftly bury the hatchet about that denied ticket! Modi did this with rare aplomb and much adulatory speechifying, and even showed every inclination, though he managed to exercise a restraint fuelled by good taste in the end, to top off the very successful photo opportunity, with a hug for Sunitabehn. This hug, had it taken place, would have been no ordinary hug because it was intended to encompass the Pandya tribe, the American nation by proxy, and India’s manned flight aspirations in space. And probably one or two hidden agendas as well.

But as reckonings go, two birds with one stone is a good enough tally. And as for the inadvertent human interest story and the blatant Gandhigiri on camera- it’s a bonus if you want to see beyond Ahmedabad. After all, as Sunitabehn kept saying, in Washington and New Delhi alike, things do look so peaceful down here from up there. It’s enough to inspire Man and Martian to do just a spot of stardusting.


(721 words)

Title: When Ziggy Stardust came a calling!

By Gautam Mukherjee

Wednesday 10th October 2007

Also published in The Sunday Pioneer, Agenda Section, "Dialogue" on 14th October, 2007

This and all other essays on GHATOTKACHSERIES are copyright 2005-2007 by Gautam Mukherjee. All rights reserved.