At a distance of 22 billion kilometres from the Earth, Voyager 1 floats in space. Inside the spacecraft is a 12-inch, gold-plated sonograph that carries the Sounds Of Earth. Amidst a volcano’s roar, a child’s laughter, a tractor’s rumble, the compositions of Bach and Beethoven, the night chants of the Navajo, is Surshri Kesarbai Kerkar’s moving melody.
The sounds and images were put together by a committee chaired by Dr Carl Sagan, in the hope that someday it would be played by intelligent beings galaxies away. In Sagan’s own words,
The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.
And in this bottle, Surshri Kesarbai Kerkar’s ‘Jaat Kahan ho akeli gori’, continues to float in the cosmic ocean. The song which translates to ‘where are you going alone girl, fair maiden,’ is a mother’s plea to her daughter to not go out alone, as she is too young. Yet, Kesarbai sings it with the belief that she will leave anyway. This eternal dynamic immortalised in space is an ode to the story of Voyager, and of Kesarbai.
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